Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g. Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move that content into whatever format is required. As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary formatting requirements, this is in fact what you are forced to do anyway, since you have a study and basic content, but must adhere to whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands.

The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures).