I really value the fact that LaTeX is free software, but as a matter of practical reality, are old LaTeX documents really more accessible than Word documents? There is plenty of free software with (imperfect) support for Word these days. I recently opened a bunch of Word documents that were more than 20 years old, and I'm sure I didn't get a pixel-perfect reproduction of the original document, but as someone without a strong grasp of the LaTeX package ecosystem, I imagine compiling old LaTeX documents would have been more difficult than just installing LibreOffice or uploading the document to Google Docs.
I never regretted it, nowadays I avoid Word when possible and go for org-mode documents mixed with LaTeX. That gives me all the features and control but with less typing.
I find that much easier to do in Word. Instead of wrangling with conflicting packages, documented for programmers not users, having to compile multiple times to get the references to actually render correctly, etc in Word I can simply define my references in a structured way and they work perfectly without surprises.
Word documents can be edited by people who have access to an appropriate version of Word (I do not, admittedly by choice) but the documents themselves are binary (ok, xml) mess, whereas LaTeX ones are greppable, searcheable, etc. They also 'age' much better. I can still LaTeX most documents from 20 years ago (sometimes with minor changes).
As a disclaimer, I am one of those people who uses (La)TeX for everything. I know TeX intimately to the point that I messed with the source code several times and wrote tens of thousands of TeX macros (this is not an exaggeration). I may be biased but I still feel that learning LaTeX is well worth the modest effort it takes to start writing LaTeX documents. And the typesetting TeX is capable of is still unsurpassed.