This works great with your own document or small experienced group. But let any "normal" person do any changes... and you're back to local modifications. And is actually hard to figure out what was done ad-hoc and what via styles.
Done.
We enforce this and it makes it so much easier for everybody. We also enforce that no one is allowed to mess with the style definitions once they are fixed for the specific project.
It is the same as if one is using code formatting rules and enforces them by configuration of linting tools.
Do some people complain, because they cannot do their personal pet peeve? Sure. Do I care in terms of the greater good for the project or the team? Only in so far as I learn not to want said people in my projects/teams.
Do some people point out specific and relevant flaws in the designe/code/style rules? Sure. Do they count? Hell yes. I love these people in my teams/projects. They know how to understand systems, think systematically and also how to communicate relevant criticism in a productive way.
Feature request: some sort of ML in Word that detects when someone is using spaces to line text up between lines, stops them, and pops up a tutorial on using the ruler.
You can also do a search for double spaces.
It's not that they can't easily mess up. Instead there's a higher barrier to do that - once you're past it, you have more understanding of the system.
Wow. That was my hot tip for Word 1.0 too. I felt they did a rather too good job of hiding them subsequently.
Out of curiosity how large were these documents, and were they completely text or did they contain a fair number of images?
I'm asking since I once ran into a situation with a long and image-filled Word document (150 ish pages, maybe 50 high res images) where there was a noticeable lag when typing and saving would take 30s.
Hope that is useful information for you.
My hot Word tip is to use Styles. My other hot Word tip is to use cross-references. If you type "See Figure 3-1" in full, you're doing it wrong.
If anyone from Microsoft is reading this, please fix a) the unreadable text in the Styles drop-down selection list in dark mode and b) stop asking my if the large amount of data I put on the clipboard should be available to other apps when I exit Word. With SSDs, this anachronism takes me far longer to read and click No to vs. just saving the damn clipboard content without asking me.