I feel that would be comparing apples to oranges. A lot of the stuff he talks about in the article is about emacs as an editor, and not specific to restructured text. Whereas R bookdown is a package for converting complex R markdown into books (via pandoc). By the way, I believe there are packages now for using R markdown in emacs, though I haven't tried any of them myself - R studio's support for R markdown is just too good to consider a switch. (On the other hand I use emacs exclusively for latex)
If you want to compare restructured text with R markdown, then they are simply different tools for different problems. If you want to embed code/figures/tables directly in the writing, R markdown is difficult to beat. Personally I would tend to prefer writing in either latex or markdown, but my reason is similar to the author's: I know latex and (R) markdown much better than I know restructured text.
If you want to compare restructured text with R markdown, then they are simply different tools for different problems. If you want to embed code/figures/tables directly in the writing, R markdown is difficult to beat. Personally I would tend to prefer writing in either latex or markdown, but my reason is similar to the author's: I know latex and (R) markdown much better than I know restructured text.