Markdown for large, complex, technical docs published as PDFs

Wondering if anyone is publishing large, complex, technical docs in PDF format, where documents have lot of technical drawings, drawings and tables having admonitions, complex formatting in large tables spanning across pages, 5-6 level deep section hierarchy and PDF has elements of branding like specific fonts being used, specific colours for section headers, chapter numbers, specific location of page numbers, chapter name, document name in header/footers etc.

We've been recommended the usage of Asciidoc for this, but R&D has made a strong pushback against Asciidoc saying that it is so much harder compared to Markdown and reading it is like reading HTML to understand content. With Asciidoc, I've already done a pilot and generating good quality PDF is proven, but I tend to agree with R&D engineer feedback on Asciidoc being harder on eyes.