People do say this though. People have personal preferences for the software they have to use all day, and most of the time people don't agree on what that software is. And most of those decisions are driven by the type of work people do. I don't expect a lawyer or a business analyst to use command line interfaces, and I don't think they expect software engineers to code in Word...
And the other people, who were discussing the command line, ignore them.
The point is that you can't really criticize something when your criticism seems to boil down to "I don't understand this".
And who said anything about writing code in Word? What are you on about?!
For the last year Word has actually supported LaTeX for math equations, see https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/murrays/2017/07/30/latex-ma...
But aside from that, Word is great for short and medium length documents, especially ones that need group editing. Put a Word file up on Sharepoint, and now there is user friendly change tracking and commenting.
I've written multiple technical specs in Word, it serves as a great way to collaborate, so long as everyone has bought into the ecosystem.
Well that's the problem isn't it, every potential collaborator who can't or won't buy it will be shunned.
The same argument can be made for any piece of software. People have to buy in, even free software requires taking time to learning it vs whatever existing workflow is in use (if any).
OP points out LaTeX, but for non-technical and non-academic people, this is a non-starter. Word has an extremely low barrier to entry so it makes tons of sense for the general public and K-12 education markets.
There's a reason it's so popular and why LibreOffice and GSuite have emulated the bulk of it's feature set.
I cringe every time I have to deal with a Word file.