Quarto, I think, is definitely a step in the right direction. It allows for publication quality rendering into pdf, and various html flavors including Confluence. You can write fluently in it, mix-in actual running code, and you've got options for sophisticated graphics, tables and mathematics.
I do hope the Quarto project makes it and survives. It's a cut above the other notebook solutions like jupyter.
What's the advantage of Quarto over Jupyter? I looked at Quarto and rejected it because I couldn't find a way for a single cell to programatically generate interleaved markdown and plots (I can do this with Jupyter).
Not sure what you mean as there is no notion of "cell" in Quarto.
Instead, everything is markdown and you can interleave codeblocks (or inline code statements) anywhere you like to generate plots/tables, etc.
I haven't had a need to generate markdown programmatically, though I imagine there's probably at least a "hard way" to do that. FWIW, quarto is still in its early stages. The quarto devs on github are very nice and responsive to questions if you ever look into again.
I do hope the Quarto project makes it and survives. It's a cut above the other notebook solutions like jupyter.