Generally agreed, writing should be a tool that supports clear thinking, and a giant mess of unreadable markup is not amenable for thinking.

I’m still reading through this post, but it seems to have some great advice for making that situation at least a little better, like the trick with mathtools to make paired braces more readable

I collaborate with some academics that strongly prefer to do all writing and editing in MS Word, but I’ve personally found that to be a lot worse for supporting clear thinking, especially if any math is involved