Having worked on a job application and onboarding web application, I can tell you that our customers prefer PDF or image renderings of the documents over word. Even imperfect word -> pdf conversions are tolerated to some extent if it means not having to open word.

And our customers are mostly entrenched industrial suppliers and government-owned private entities with byzantine processes, not some tech startups.

In my experience they love to use Office internally, but not for external documents.