Scientific literature seems to disagree with this statement: "An Efficiency Comparison of Document Preparation Systems Used in Academic Research and Development" [1]
For example, amount of written text was higher among Word novices than among LaTeX experts, with overall less mistakes. The only category where LaTeX users produced more content than Word users was equation text, and even in that case, authors suggest that the difference in productivity between Word experts and LaTeX experts does not differ significantly.
Granted it was 3 decades ago, but when I was in grad school, choosing to use LaTeX seemed to add a few months of effort to the "writing" stage of a thesis. However, it was hard to assign root cause because LaTeX and Word were producing different things. The best technology allowed you to create more, but at a price. Typeset dissertations were beautiful, mine was not.
What LaTeX allowed you to do, in principle, was to "build" your document, i.e., type a single command and have camera ready output roll out of the laser printer. Using Word (or even more primitive tools -- I was on a MS-DOS machine), always required some manual intervention. My workflow involved scissors, glue, scotch tape, and a copy machine. But I got done very quickly once I was ready to start writing.
LaTeX has the massive (!!1) advantage of being trivial to put into version control.
I wonder how they incorporated that into their productivity metrics
As an aside, I have used a workflow where I give someone a a paper to review as an overleaf project, they make all their changes, and then I merge it back into my work picking and choosing the bits I want. And this all works fairly nicely since overleaf has support for git.
I don't think that is the primary benefit of latex.
Latex is exceedingly expressive and lets you be very precise about exactly what you want on the page and how it is typeset - much more so than Word is capable of. This comes at the cost of learning the language, which isnt user friendly - e.g. I've never had a word document that didnt compile.
Turing complete code, by contrast, demands a high level of language expressivity to do everything beyond the most basic tasks.
Using a GUI to write code becomes like using Word to professionally typeset a an academic textbook very, very quickly.
So quickly I'd argue that there's almost no point even starting.
