LaTeX absolutely shines when you have someone providing a template; hardly anything comes close.

When you're on your own, you need to either steal someone else's and modify it, learn to build your own, or just use something like the Memoir package (which is the first but designed for it.)

Even if you don't use LaTeX at all, "A Few Notes on Book Design" is worth the read: https://ctan.org/pkg/memdesign

Elements of Typographic Style is also a good one if you want to geek out.