I can confirm. When trying convert simple Word sentences and tables to e.g. Markdown/HTML from a Word XML you need a PhD in XML edge cases and nested garbage.
Well, it is not pretty to see how the sausage gets made, but extracting formatted text from docx is absolutely doable, no PhD involved. Source: I have done it as a little sidequest because it was useful to audit a set of word documents.
I wonder if this tool by MSFT is able to handle that:
https://github.com/microsoft/markitdown
I was amazed when I realised that Word docs were just zip files and you could poke around in the xml files embedded inside of them.
I almost implemented a working React -> Word document renderer back in 2017, but it didn't have support for creating the xml tags with : inside of them (which OOXML documents use).