This is actually kind of true. LaTeX is a Turing-complete language, which makes converting it to other things somewhat unreliable. But, there's kind of an info

This is actually kind of true. LaTeX is a Turing-complete language, which makes converting it to other things somewhat unreliable. But, there's kind of an informal subset of LaTeX that you can use and not be too bad off with Pandoc. In general, I'd like to do academic and report writing in Markdown (or Org!), but limitations of Markdown usually make it easier for me to do my writing directly in LaTeX, portability be damned. The biggest impediment for Markdown in academic / report writing I'm my opinion is the lack of internal references (things like "see figure X"). Org-mode can be converted via Pandoc much the same as markdown, but doesn't have the issue with cross-references.