Having written many papers, reports and my entire Ph. D. thesis in Latex, and also moved between LaTeX classes/templates when changing journals... I'm inclined to agree to an extent. I think every layout system has a final hand-tweaking component (like inline HTML in markdown for example), but LaTeX has a very steep learning curve once you go beyond the basic series of plots and paragraphs. There are so many tricks and hacks for padding and shifting and adjusting your layout, and some of them are "right" and others are "wrong" for really quite esoteric reasons (like which abstraction layer they work at, or some priority logic).

Of course in the end it's extremely powerful and still my favourite markup language when I need something more powerful than markdown (although reStructuredText is not so bad either). But it's really for professionals with the time to learn a layout system.

Then again there are other advantages to writing out the layout, when it comes to archiving and accessibility, due to the structured information contained in the markup beyond what is rendered. arXiv makes a point about this and forces you to submit LaTeX without rendering the PDF, so that they can really preserve it.

Yet simple Markdown documents automatically converted into pdf by pandoc look ten times better than most MS Office documents I've had to deal with over the past couple of decades. Most MS Office users have very little knowledge of its capabilities and do things like adjusting text blocks with spaces, manually number figures (which results in broken references that lead to the wrong figure — or nowhere), manually apply styles to text instead of using style presets (resulting in similar things being differently styled), etc.

In my experience you do that more in Word then in Latex (the I added some paragraphs here and wtf is that picture two pages later doing now problem).

The issue is to some degree quite fundamental to the underlying challenges of laying out formatted text with embedded things, affecting both word and LaTex.

through that is assuming you now how to properly use Word / LaTex if you don't you can cause yourself a huge amount of work ;)

At work I use our ChatGPT page to generate an HTML+CSS skeleton of what I want and tweak that. It's quicker for me than doing the equivalent in word, and easier to manipulate later. Most of the time I don't need anyone else editing my docs, so it works out.