You may be limited for your thesis. My grad program required us to conform to either a Word or LaTeX template, of which I found the latter actually much easier

You may be limited for your thesis. My grad program required us to conform to either a Word or LaTeX template, of which I found the latter actually much easier to deal with. I just kept my chapters in separate files that are inputted into the template. If you're asking for other assignments, I'd actually recommend Quarto [1]. It's basically a streamlined version of your current workflow. The other benefit is that it can convert your markdown to Typst if you decide to switch over in the future. 1: https://quarto.org https://quarto.org