This paper has been criticized in many places, because the way it's set up of course Word will win. People had to do things like very specific figure placement

This paper has been criticized in many places, because the way it's set up of course Word will win. People had to do things like very specific figure placement that is difficult in LaTeX. But in reality, most people just accept how LaTeX handles the figure placement by default (which is usually quite good), and doesn't waste time fighting it. So it's not really a real-life comparison of the two. If the challenge had been "Write a document formatted according to the norms of your field", which is what people are actually doing most of the time, LaTeX would win easily. For scientific papers the journal is going to redo all the formatting anyway (using their own custom LaTeX set-ups), so there's no reason to waste time on this.