Ha! Trust me I have no aversion to reading. I just didn't realize what was needing to be read. This is an important learner point: I've authored a book using bookdown and done considerable work with RMarkdown. Until you told me that the ::: syntax was actually a Pandoc construct, I had no idea it was.
I can only imagine how perplexing all this is to new learners who literally can't figure out what piece of software they are controlling. They think they are using, maybe RStudio, no wait, it's RMarkdown, well maybe knitr ... only to discover they are actually using Pandoc.
I have no idea what the solution is, but this ambiguity of what software/library we are coding against is a real conceptual challenge to new learners. It's big enough that I suspect some give up in a fit of rage before figuring out what to Google.