> I even had a go at writing a LaTeX paper of my own (it never got finished; there was a lesson there).

The lesson is that the author found LaTeX too difficult or did not have the patience for it. But maybe we should take our advice from someone who has actually written a document with it.

Like any tool (including WYSIWYG editors) there is a learning curve. Once the up-front cost has been paid, using the tool is easy.

I notice that the author uses Emacs. They could just as easily have written a long article about how that's a waste of time and everyone should use Nano, because you don't need to learn any keybindings and the result is just text anyway.

> ‘making humans edit XML is sadistic’

Agreed, but LaTeX is not XML and nobody is making anyone do anything.