Wow it sounds like you're describing exactly me. All the way until the touchscreen laptop with Windows 8. Scary shit!

I used to laugh at the LaTeX masochists in college spending 15 minutes just to put a picture where they wanted the picture to be. They had to add like four 1-character modifiers to the "insert image" command, each of which meant "yes, really here", "no, don't move it to the next page" and "nono, really really here".

MS Word is properly great if you only use the custom style rules (basically CSS classes) at the paragraph level, and never directly apply styling (basically inline styles) except for super basic stuff like making a word italic. Has great referencing tools etc, fantastic formula editor and so on. And, well, you can use ultra modern human-machine interaction technology such as a mouse to choose where a picture goes and how big it is.

(They might've enshittified it since; the last paper I wrote was in 2010 and Word was pretty damn decent back then)