Nonsense. Formatting demands make things worse here, you could just ask authors to submit unformatted content (e.g. Markdown or RMarkdown, or utterly minimal LaTeX file, with references and a bibliography file) and then trivially move that content into whatever format is required. There are in fact journals that do this too (i.e. don't have formatting requirements).

As a submitter applying to multiple journals with arbitrary formatting requirements, you are often forced to meet arbitrary and irrelevant (visual) style requirements even before you are likely to be published, so of course you keep a base unformatted copy that you modify as needed to satisfy whatever bullshit policies each random journal demands. This wastes everyone's time.

The reason submitters don't "play nicely" is because the publishers' demands ("style guides") are demented here: they should just be asking for unformatted content (besides figures), certainly for submissions, and even for accepted publications: they should actually be doing the work of formatting and typesetting. But instead they force most of this on the submitters, to save costs by extorting the desperation of academics.