Yikes, Word on macOS is certainly nowhere near best in class. It's a completely buggy heap of trash, as soon as numbered styles, images, or tables of contents become important. On the plus side, Word doesn't crash as much as Excel on macOS does for me. Pages, Numbers, and Keynote are far better on macOS than their respective MS apps in my experience.

If I had to use Word for anything except the most simple documents, I'd probably run it in a VM.

Better yet, don't upgrade. MacOS upgrades seem to just be getting worse and worse.

I tried word on macos. I recall there were some issues which made it harder. Though, I would like to use it, as Microsoft will support it until the end of time.

I may simply switch to a markdown template. I used to use Pages for book publishing and copying to html, but the books have become less important.

Word is truly dreadful, not just to use but the code it generates in each document is a mess, it’s no wonder there’s so many formatting problems in docx files.