I'm interested to hear what you would propose.

Not sure what GP had in mind, but one can programmatically generate PDFs directly, without using something like Typst as a "middleman".

Have you tried doing that? It’s no fun at all and far from easy. I don’t quite see a benefit in doing it without some utility.

Besides, the generation of PDF reports is usually decoupled from the templates, so you will have to work on your own "middleman".

Apache iText, for example.

I guess some webkit solution like wkhtmltopdf

How is that more efficient than Typst exactly?