While there are formatting guidelines, I've never seen them so specific that you could only easily do it in Latex. Is that really common?

I've never actually see it as the assumed default option.. Maybe a decade back I could see that.. but not now.

The matter isn't really that something is possible only in latex, but that a department/university might have its own template/document class of arbitrary complexity that you would have to reimplement

I think there’s a Latex template you can use, or you have to make your own document that looks as similar as possible. It’s not a list of guidelines but a template that specifies how it’s supposed to look.