I'm not against typst. I think it's integration would be a lot easier and more straightforward I just don't know if it's really that popular yet in academia.
Yes, but there's a really large number of users who don't want to have to setup vscode, git, texlive, latex workshop, just to collaborate on a paper. You shouldn't have to become a full stack software engineer to be able to write a research paper in LaTeX.
I could see it seeming likely that because the UI is quite minimalist, but the AI capabilities are very extensive, imo, if you really play with it.
You're right that something like Cursor can work if you're familiar with all the requisite tooling (git, installing cursor, installing latex workshop, knowing how it all works) that most researchers don't want to and really shouldn't have to figure out how to work for their specific workflows.
The deeper I got, the more I realized really supporting the entire LaTeX toolchain in WASM would mean simulating an entire linux distribution :( We wanted to support Beamer, LuaLaTeX, mobile (wasn't working with WASM because of resource limits), etc.