LaTeX is free and it is open source. That alone explains its wide use in academia, where money for paid software like MS Word and knowhow for managing software

LaTeX is free and it is open source. That alone explains its wide use in academia, where money for paid software like MS Word and knowhow for managing software licenses is often not available. You could probably make a similar study comparing Mathematica/Wolfram language against Python with a similar result. Still academia will always prefer Python, because it is free and open source.