People often will use .doc rather than .docx when they’re trying to convert to a format that non-Word apps are more likely to be able to parse.

And bad formatting can result in an almost unreadable document. For example all bullet levels becoming the same, which is an example of something I’ve seen before.

None of this seems off to me.

It's the opposite. .doc was never fully reverse engineered properly, but .docx is way easier to handle and was for quite a while.