Yeah FOSS is really fucking magic holy shit. These are professional tools in terms of functionality and efficiency. And guess what they are open source and maintained by a global community.
I think there is a faster way to do the knit() step, using nvim-R keybindings. I'll look into that.
https://github.com/lervag/vimtex
https://github.com/jalvesaq/Nvim-R