I work in an academic setting and I can second the sentiment. For a while, we used reStructuredText for writing the teaching materials. Every so often I would have the students that would get inspired to contribute something to the teaching materials, but would subsequently get demotivated by having to learn the rST syntax and tooling.
After a few years, I gave up and switched from rST and Sphinx to Markdown and MkDocs [2]. We addressed the limitations of Markdown with PyMdown Extensions [3]. Still haven't looked back; for our specific use case of writing (computer science) teaching materials, Markdown is a better choice than rST.
[1] https://gaseri.org/en/blog/2017-07-29-why-we-use-restructure...
[2] https://gaseri.org/en/blog/2021-08-16-markdown-vs-restructur...