To be honest, I can feel the "cultishness" you mentioned, but I'm curious if you also feel that for R Markdown products (which are mostly irrelevant to Tidyverse). If you do, I'd love to try my best to fix that, because that's something that I personally don't like. I want to make it clear that if you don't use R Markdown, you are definitely not doing anything wrong, e.g., LaTeX and HTML are totally legitimate and supported:

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/latex-hardcore...

https://bookdown.org/yihui/rmarkdown-cookbook/html-hardcore....