I think things have changed a bit since you were a physics student. Conferences hand out latex templates and expect you to use them (wish they would also hand out an overleaf template. If any conference organizers are reading this...). Universities also do this with their undergrad/masters/thesis templates. Arxiv expects you to upload tex source code (it'll reject a PDF if you wrote that PDF with latex. It also is terrible at error messaging which is a huge pain since submission timing is for some stupid reason important). I'm sure latex is also easier than back then, but there's a lot of momentum in the latex direction that I think would be really difficult to undo. Even paper acceptance is highly influenced by formatting and figure design. I think it is just a different world as we have a lot more researchers now than even 30 years ago.
Amusingly, some things haven't changed. I was the first student to turn in a word processed term paper at my college, I think in 1983. And I estimate that I earned as much as a full letter grade on my GPA because the prof's had never thought about how to grade a paper that was 100% mechanically perfect. It didn't hurt that I had become a very fast typist thanks to programming. I selectively chose courses where the grading was primarily based on written work, something that most students feared.
I'm sorry, I'm failing to realize why this story is about how things have/n't changed w.r.t. word/latex usage withing the last 30 years in academic writing.
Your comment about formatting and figure design influencing acceptance, triggered my droll little reminiscence. I certainly wasn't disagreeing with you.
