Compared to what?
Ask yourself this: When was the last time you truly needed MS Office to produce something of value? Not imaginary enterprise “I look busy so I must be getting things done” value... but true value.
Sure, designers create beautiful presentations outside PowerPoint, but I can grab master slides, plomp down the stuff that I wrote in a plain text file and bam - presentation ready in 10 minutes.
Excel - I'm a programmer but even I use Excel for quick data tasks - cleanup, remove duplicates, create histogram and summary, build a pipeline for data where I see intermediate values for every step for every data point. I might be an exception but I sometimes even copy data from an SQL client to Excel to drill into it.
Or Access? Entire departments of non-technical people are running on this stuff.
If Office didn't provide anything of value nobody would use it.
I've never written a thesis (at all, let alone for a PhD), but my impression from people who have is that the academic institution typically already has a LaTeX .sty or template or whatever, so literally all you're doing is writing content (and the minimal amount of markup necessary for document structure).
That said, I can see how this might quickly go sideways as soon as you start using TikZ, or if you do indeed have to create your own style (though in the latter case the defaults seem reasonable, and indeed seem common if the numerous academic papers I've read over the years are any indication). I've written my fair share of technical documentation with LaTeX and it can definitely be a rabbit hole, albeit usually a self-inflicted one.
And that's definitely true about Excel and Access. Virtually every company has at least one Excel spreadsheet or Access database that's effectively mission-critical, lol.
The only tools people don't complain about are the ones that no one uses.
I've lost my 100 hours trying to get Word to consistently place images in technical docs, only to wind up fighting some of the most unpredictable placement calculations I've ever encountered. I want to punch my screen right now just thinking about it.
It's a tool for not too long technical documents, for secretarial work, for basic marketing text, for quick an dirty but decently presented invoices, for writing a resume.
It has never been meant for writing novels, for page setting, for writing hundreds of pages of technical documentation, and yet... it is used for that. Everyday.
Simply because it's available everywhere.
InDesign is infinitely better for typesetting, but you're the learning curve to get something presentable is higher than LaTeX, because you have to know design, and more expensive than Word.
LyX is the only tool that comes close to replacing Word. It's free, significantly better typesetting, easy to use, and available in most platforms.