I've used both Word and LaTeX now for decades. For virtually all my documents which I will eventually export as a PDF file, I use Word for my fiction and LaTeX for almost everything else, including essays that may have no math in them at all. So, I feel I am in a good position to compare them.
I would say that LaTeX does have a 'steep' learning curve, but so does any other program that I would use to render a bunch of math in. I want at this time to judge the merits of Word vs LaTeX based only on the work one must put into the document compared to the quality of output.
This steep learning curve for LaTeX has been greatly lessened over the decades, as there are now abundant on-line resources, and practically every question I ever queried recently on the Internet on how to solve one of my LaTeX problems has been both asked and answered on some webpage or LaTeX forum. This greatly contrasts to a few decades ago, when all you had to solve your problems were a few costly manuals to read from. My point is that people who have formed a bias against LaTeX by having tried it only decades ago, may not be up-to-date on the abundance of free resources now available.
How about an example? When I just now entered the text "how to display a unity symbol in Word", I got back useless information way off topic. But when I entered "how to display a unity symbol in LaTeX", I got immediate useful information. By the way, what I mean by unity symbol is this (or variation of it):
This symbol was a real problem I had to solve in LaTeX recently, and I found the answers I needed quickly on the Internet. That's a hint of how good the online resources for LaTeX have become these days.
According to the search engines, a unity symbol for Word is a bunch of hands coming together, and for most uses in Word that makes sense. But if you were trying to typeset a mathematics unity symbol in Word, all those hits at the top of the query list are just noise you have to wade through.
So why do the search engines get it right for a unity symbol in LaTeX? Simple. Because LaTeX is about typesetting mathematics and the unity symbol has a meaning as a math symbol. And this is probably reinforced by frequent inquires on it.
Lastly, your LaTeX equations can now be ported effortlessly to webpages via in inclusion of a Mathjax environment definer in your webpages. More about this elsewhere.