Reading this thread many people do not seem to understand what to the problem even is. What researchers writing Papers want is a low effort/high flexibility way to write documents (Nobody wants to write their paper in HTML). For a paper to be printed it needs to be in some printable format, like PDF. To provide accessibility and accommodate the changing ways papers are read, which is increasingly online, HTML is also a desirable output.
What really is needed is a markup language which natively can target both PDF and HTML. This is something typst is working on, but I am not aware of any other project, which either comes close to the features of LaTeX or supports both target formats.
To me this is the only reasonably way to address the accessibility and usability issues around Papers. Have one markup, with sufficient accessibility features, which simultaneously targets HTML and PDF.