The lack of good support for MS Office formats in FOSS tools is Microsoft's fault. Office itself often creates files that are slightly incompatible with their own published OOXML standard. FOSS tools are left chasing these inconsistencies. I wish the world had settled on ODF instead of OOXML for documents.

Definitely agree with this one, though I will say you can replace one proprietary bit of software (Microsoft Office) with another (Google Drive/Docs) and get a large portion of the way in some industries. Really depends on what you need to do.

But alas, still no widely accepted FOSS alternatives.

Pro tip: If you draft documents in Markdown, lots of programs have a "preview" that renders perfect formatted text to paste into a Word document.

I find it saves me a ton of hassle to leave Word to the very last step, when .docx is required.

Yeah I've been seeing this reasoning for many years now, but as someone who lives in Word and Excel for office work, it's actually been a really long time since I couldn't use Pages/Numbers/LibreOffice in place of Office just as effectively.