Hi sitandr!
Thankyou so much! That makes perfect sense - the $$ made me think it was typst but yes, it is indeed pandoc templating prior to being run through typst. The following ended up working for me:
$for(revisions/first)$
$it.author$ - $it.date$
$endfor$
as per https://pandoc.org/chunkedhtml-demo/6.1-template-syntax.html
Cheers for pointing me in the right direction! I will have a look at what you mentioned with regards to cmarker- although the main goal here is to have the very least friction possible to creating documents, hence going for markdown.
Regards