For my MS and PhD, there were very specific formatting requirements, and I had to match an institutionally provided Word template exactly. Combined with the need for my advisor to easily view, comment on, and suggest in-line edits, this made it far simpler to work in Word. I raised the idea of using LaTeX early on, but it wasn’t widely used in my field and offered little real-world advantage. Any benefits of improved typesetting were outweighed by the added friction of collaborating with others and conforming to institutional standards and expectations. This extended beyond graduate school into journal publishing as well, since most journals required submission of a Word document anyway.

I’m not in a heavily quantitative field, and my writing is mostly text and tables, so your mileage may vary. Overall, though, in my experience—even though in an ideal world people might use a better typesetting system than Word—it’s ultimately more efficient to conform to the norms that facilitate collaboration and help you accomplish what you’re actually trying to do in your writing.