(ProTip: Maybe you hated it from school because it was used as a tool for teaching theory and beginner stuff, and you were given difficult homework assignments. Maybe you'd like it more if you learned how to use it practically, while you were working on things you actually wanted to do.)
To be fair, LaTeX, git, and Vim, beyond shallow use, have fairly steep learning curves and can initially seem like a huge inconvenient mess before one learns, through trial and error, enough of the basics to really unlock enough utility to justify their use.
In a perfect world we'd all first sit down with manuals/tutorials, absorb everything from the getgo, and hack away with bliss; but most people, myself included, do not have enough intrinsic interest to muster the will to sit through documentation while paying enough attention to absorb a bunch of seemingly irrelevant details about some involved tech tool, when we have one simple goal to accomplish now, so instead we piece everything together with a combination of Google searches and keyboard mashing until things work and then optimize on top of that later.
In my experience this can be one of the factors that define a so called 10x dev - the willingness and ability to plod through docs with a genuine interest before using a powerful tool. I imagine such crowd is overrepresented on HN but quite rare in the general population.
Vi predates keyboards with arrow keys and numpad. You can do most of what vim can do in any editor if you can use your keyboard effectively. Then there is the question of VI vs VIM. Some schools force students to use VI, which is really a different and antiquated beast.
LaTeX lost a lot of relevance since Office 2010, that added a great equations editor and better handling of sections/subsections.
TeX still renders equations better than Office does. Also it's programmable.
I think you are spot on with the intrinsic interest.
I know a lot of people in school who have to use a generally well regarded technology, but hate it because they had to use it in a class. For example, they might see someone on github and go “oh is that github? I hate using git” when in reality they had to use it in a group project with 4 other people who have never used it, and had no understanding of branches, merging, etc.
I have seen the same thing with LaTeX, Python, and Vim.