The good news is that (a) for a Word conversion this is mostly irrelevant because other type of LaTeX constructs often cannot be exported to Word in any way. i.e., there are not a clear Word equivalent (b) statistical reports rarely need other special thing that tables and figures generated by R, i.e., the basic markdown structures plus R chunks are more than enough. And (c) for a special high quality PDF, you can insert LaTeX commands directly in the Rmarkdown/Quarto text (although, unfortunately, will be used only in case of a PDF output). A small example: