The weird thing is that to a significant extent that battle is really just about the words "Microsoft Office". LibreOffice has some awkwardness and annoyances, but it's quite adequate for probably 90% of mundane office tasks people need to do (and MS Office has its own pain points). A major barrier is just a specific insistence that Word be used, without any reference to functional requirements of the actual document.

People always say this but the 90% doesn’t count. The 90% is easy. It’s the other bit that people hit and compatibility issues mean any non standard approach whether it’s fair or not will always, always get the blame.

Plus I dispute that libreoffice has even close to 90% of what excel can do.

I’ve never met a document an office document that wouldn’t have been better as a wiki (if it is intended to be impermanent), or as a something like a LaTeX document (if it is not).

I've found that OnlyOffice has much better Microsoft Office compatibility. I just install it via flatpak, remove the network permission, and go about my business perfectly. While LibreOffice -> LibreOffice works perfectly fine, whenever it opens a .docx file it always wants to save it as a .odf which is a nonstarter. Not because I don't want to support open document formats but because everyone expects a .docx back if they send you one. It also struggles consistently for any type of advanced formatting (as a .docx).