Why are you using asciidoc to write a book, instead of LaTeX ? I see the advantage of using this for documentation, but for an entire book ?
None of these are showstoppers, but quite a few paper cuts that leave me reaching for Latex only as a last resort. There are tooling and workflows one can adopt to minimize the pain, but it requires a lot of setup if I just want to get some text on a page.
I have stupidly optimistic hopes that something like [Skribilo](https://www.nongnu.org/skribilo/) would take over in this space, but I know that is foolhardy. Would require a generation of physicists and mathematicians to give up their hard-won Latex knowledge.
On the other hand, if you already know the gist of Markdown, then you could pick up reStructuredText or AsciiDoc in less than an hour. They're more feature-rich than markdown, without adding too much squeeze for the juice.
If needed, you can also sprinkle the Markdown with LaTeX, such as to enforce page breaks at specific points.
You use LaTeX when you have to for some specific thing, perhaps equations, but at other times, you can stick with the simpler syntax of (AsciiDoc|reStructuredText|Org-Mode).
That's what I do at least.
In a book one often needs to keep track of local references (to figures, tables, sections, etc). How this could be reasonably done in markdown flavors?
We need an open source alternative to https://www.princexml.com/samples/
Or at least one not that expensive.
TeXmacs: https://www.texmacs.org
As far as I know e.g. this book https://www.editions-ellipses.fr/accueil/4856-le-petit-pytho... has been written with TeXmacs, and antoher is in preparation by the same author. Also, Joris van der Hoeven has written a guide to TeXmacs ("The Jolly Writer") using TeXmacs