I 100% agree with the premises of the original post and the concerns voiced there because I experience the same hurdles when using Pluto, although I should specify that Pluto is still way better than the competition.
I have also personally experienced this issue with updating markdown in other cells, but I don’t think what is suggested in the quote above is a viable solution to this problem.
Indeed, it would update the LaTeX formulae if markdown cells were all always executed after one of them has been updated. This is not possible because Pluto only updates cells that were affected by the changes, and since unlike Jupiter Notebook a markdown cell is no different than a Julia code cell, all Pluto sees is some string literal being updated which is not being used in any other piece of Julia code.
Now there are two “obvious” solutions (“obvious” in the sense that they come to mind but are not actually viable):
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Execute all cells after a change was made. This would fix LaTeX, but is not viable because if intense calculations are made, you don’t want to have the machine perform them again just because you updated some formula.
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Change the way Pluto works to “remember” which are markdown cells and which are not, and if a markdown cell is updated, all other markdown cells are updated. This could be helpful if one assumes that latex cells can be evaluated quickly because they don’t contain actual heavy calculations, but that fact is just not true because you can have calculations in a markdown cell if you employ the use of
$string interpolation or wrap the contents of the cell in abegin... endblock and add some more code.
Another problem is that Pluto relies on MathJax to do the LatEx rendering as I have personally discovered recently and has little to no control over fixing MathJax’ limitations.
TLDR; I don’t think top-down evaluation would fix LaTeX/markdown issues.
// EDIT
Clarification: top-down would improve my own experience using Pluto in a couple of ways, but not the LaTeX issues.