I wrote my dissertation in Word. 200+ pages, dozens of captioned and numbered figures and tables, over 100 equations all numbered and referenced, table of contents, cross references, works cited. I found it quite pleasant.
When my wife wrote her doctorate she did none of those things, and I ended up spending the best part of two days laboriously going through the entire document to make it conform to the university's style guide for thesis being submitted. Thankfully she uses Scrivener for writing now which as near as possible enforces doing things the right way the first time.
I would submit that the same is true for LaTeX.
I've done plenty of work where the customer insists that the final deliverable be in Word format, because that's what they're comfortable with. You can do proper formatting in Word once you learn the tools, and it's not even all that hard, although it can be somewhat unforgiving of screwups. The one thing I wouldn't attempt is to convert a TeX document to Word. In theory that shouldn't be entirely possible, but in practice there are about a million ways it could blow up in your face.
But if you have even one collaborator who goes in and hammers something by applying manual formatting, the whole thing can be ruined. Actual images can end up showing up along with its caption in the Table of Figures. Entries can go missing from tables. Lone paragraphs can randomly end up with a different style.
Word can successfully manage large, complex documents, but it requires discipline. (as does LaTeX)
And I've yet to find a guide which instructs on how to set it up properly, how to share styles across documents etc. Do you know of one?
20 years of writing HTML and CSS has spoiled me; many times I'm using Word and thinking "I could do this with one rule in CSS" (often some crazy positioning nonsense with images/tables). If only!
I will admit, however, that LaTeX run on default settings looks good. Whoever designed that bit had taste.
With that said, I wonder if the people who actually did write a thesis/dissertation in LaTeX had to do all that customization themselves.
For example, I'm in NJ and although I didn't go there, I could imagine Rutgers OIT telling people, 'If you want to use TeX, just download our package, it will install everything you need and will output the correct format for submission'
The thing is that time invested in learning superior alternatives is already spent, and there's no point taking the risks just to try for no reason.
Just like I will not create another website in FrontPage.
[1] https://www.unicode.org/notes/tn28/UTN28-PlainTextMath.pdf
It doesn't look all that bad.
I am pleased to report that the makefile for my thesis still works, and generates close to the original doc, 20 something years later. I can barely open a 10+ year old office doc thanks to incompatibilities within the product.
Back in those days, word processors would not do complicated multi-line equations very well; type setting for print, display, etc. This was a problem for me.
To each their own though. I wound up writing some user manuals for products I developed in the late 90's in LaTeX as well. I've not used it much since.
E. Allen Emerson once came knocking at the unix cave door, complaining that his older papers, written in LaTeX, were formatting differently.
Upon examination, the only difference, literally, was that we had replaced the ancient 300dpi printers with less ancient 600dpi printers. And yes, CMR is a spindley little font.