[bluenose69]

I've never seen a publisher's template that was hard to work with.

The process of writing in latex for journals (and textbooks -- I've written for both things) is really very easy. Publishers almost always provide a sample .tex file that has items you just fill in. For example, there will be something like `\authorNames{}` and you just put the names between the braces. The same goes for titles, equations, figures, etc. There will be sample paragraphs as well. And they will have examples of various citations styles, too.

Speaking of citations, latex has good support for citation databases. (Typst and markdown also provide this support.)

I'd say most people I know write their early drafts in latex. They have a target journal in mind from the start of the writing process, so they just grab the latest sample file and stylesheet(s) from the publisher's website and start entering text.

As you say, using latex for freeform documents is a different matter. That's where I've started to use typst. And I do recommend it for such things. You may find yourself wanting to make some typst templates for common tasks (meeting notes, position papers, etc.) but it's not terrible hard to make such templates. I've made a few, but often I don't bother -- I just put a few lines of customization at the start, if I want to alter how section headings look, or I want a different font from the default one.