Comment by dash2

Well... you did ask.

Bottom line: it's a leftover from the 1980s. In the 1980s it was probably quite good. So was the Commodore 64, but you wouldn't use it to write your thesis on in 2020, now, would you?

It's a mess of multiple command line tools which run each other. None of which I understand or want to learn. tex, xetex, latex, xelatex, biblatex, texi2dvi, latexmk... What?

Its error messages might be very useful if you were running them by hand in 1985, instead of via 5 other tools. Literally these messages say things like "just type ? now", as if I'm doing this shit manually. No, I'm not, because I desire to use a computer to automate these tasks.

It's a mess of multiple packages which redefine each others' macros. Namespacing? Ha ha ha. Look at this crap: https://tex.stackexchange.com/questions/420448/error-illegal...

It gets in the way. If I open my article in a text editor, I want to see the title, author, abstract and first paragraph. Not 100 lines of backslashed computer blah. If I want to insert a picture, I don't want to have to write a paragraph of backslashed computer blah.

It's ugly. I don't want to see backslashes everywhere. I don't want to write `` to open quotation marks. I don't want to write \'e for é. I want to look at something nice when I write English.

Its model is that the markup specifies semantics, not syntax or layout. So you write \emph{} to emphasize something. This is bullshit. There are 100 reasons to use, e.g., italics: emphasis, foreign language, technical terms, etc. etc. Are we going to have a keyword for each of those? No. Just let me use italics. (Of course, they have that as well. Congratulations, you timewasters.)

Its culture is toxically up its own posterior. Oh, it's pronounced techhhh? Thank you for informing me, neccccchbeard. And if I have to read one more time "oh, don't use vertical lines in tables, just use \booktabs" in response to a question about HOW TO DO something....

Its toxic culture has infected academia. I've got referee reports saying "this wasn't written in TeX" as if that were a legitimate critique. PhD students are forced to learn it and spend nights crying and trying to make their tables work. Then they get Stockholm syndrome, become vastly proud that they know to write \ldots when they mean ..., and pass the filthy disease on to their students in turn.

tl:dr; Use HTML. Use Markdown. Use Microsoft Word. Hell, use RTF. Don't use TeX. Don't let your friends use TeX. Stop the madness now. Just Say No.