I agree with the advice for authors not to spend time on formatting—leave that to the editor, book designer, and compositor—but that’s not necessarily a reason

I agree with the advice for authors not to spend time on formatting—leave that to the editor, book designer, and compositor—but that’s not necessarily a reason to avoid Microsoft Word, which despite its flaws, has extensive facilities for character and paragraph styles, including a Limit formatting to a selection of styles option that prevents direct formatting. Indeed, many publishers are set up to accept manuscripts in Word documents as the input to their editorial and production workflows, which generally use other software for the actual typesetting and e-book production.