I see LaTeX as the only game in town if you're writing a paper in math / CS / engineering / etc. The conference or journal provides a formatting template, and you use that. These days it seems like Overleaf is very commonly used to provide collaboration between authors. So it isn't really a choice, despite all the flaws.
I totally see that. That has also been the main argument from some of my friends in academia. Mainly, the question of "Is LaTeX Worth It?" is aimed at the fact that it _has_ become the default option in some academic disciplines. Is _that_ really worth it or should the people in those fields reconsider? Of course the system is old and sluggish, so nothing will change in the foreseeable future, but we all can dream.
Tools like Sphinx or reStructuredText (recommended as a front-end in the article) have their peculiarities too. It's worth having a look at ConTeXt (based on LuaTeX, see https://wiki.contextgarden.net/Main_Page#/) which avoids a lot of issues with LaTeX.
Yes it's worth it, but it demonstrates that document preparation systems are one of the longest-surviving wicked problems, still not yet solved satisfactorily.
