Many people would role their eyes at the idea of using a chain of console tools for document production, think of it as contrived. But it's not such a fancy idea. One of the first things to work on unix was roff, an ancestor of the man page system. It processed text documents into a printable form.

Most serious document production company (publishing companies and newspapers; legal firms are probably less sophisticated) have a similar pipeline within their firm. Text (raw or rigidly styled), version-controlled, running through a pipeline of reviews and signoffs and markup and arrangement.

   > I don't know of a modern equivalent

I don't think monolithic word processors will be a feature of the future. The mainstream tool will be some kind of style editor. Maybe it'll incorporate a spellcheck and some other monolithic features. There'll be a pipeline underneath - to send things to paper or web or archive or accounts.

We'll think much more in terms of snippets of styled data, and its lifecycle. We'll laugh at memories of these laborious monolithic word processing systems, and how we thought that this was productivity.