It sounds like you're not familiar with what Word's traditional strength over other word processors was, even back in the DOS version days: support for semantic

It sounds like you're not familiar with what Word's traditional strength over other word processors was, even back in the DOS version days: support for semantically meaningful structured documents + stylesheets to attach to those structures. It's a big deal. I live in emacs for most of my writing and notetaking, but I love using Word to create structured documents for clients (e.g., implementation guidelines, etc) because it's easy and works very very well, and I don't have a weird toolchain on the back end of the process to produce something they can easily consume. The tl;dr here is that it is incorrect to say that Word is a WYSIWYG editor only necessarily and only capable of unstructured work. Sure, lots of people only ever use it that way, but it has strong support for document structure and intelligent styling (to say nothing of internal change tracking), and this is what makes it a good (and popular!) choice for large-scale document work.