I can relate quite well to the author's pursuit in tinkering with their typesetting workflow. When I wrote my bachelor's thesis, I also spent a great deal of time coming up with a custom LaTeX template and workflow. Like the author, one of the pain-points was the relatively slow edit-compile-review cycle of modern LaTeX engines like LuaLaTex.
In my case, I was mainly concerned with making the resulting thesis.pdf PDF/A compliant. PDF/A is a archival compliance standard that's dedicated to the long term digital preservation of PDF files.
Predictably, I got way too carried away as well, and ended up trying to create fully-reproducible LaTeX PDFs as well. It was probably overkill for my use-case, but it did result in a fun blog post where I documented the process [1]
In my case, I was mainly concerned with making the resulting thesis.pdf PDF/A compliant. PDF/A is a archival compliance standard that's dedicated to the long term digital preservation of PDF files.
Predictably, I got way too carried away as well, and ended up trying to create fully-reproducible LaTeX PDFs as well. It was probably overkill for my use-case, but it did result in a fun blog post where I documented the process [1]
[1] https://shen.hong.io/reproducible-pdfa-compliant-latex/