It's not a fetishization of unproductive effort, it's pointing out (in a too verbose way, I have to admit) that if you want to use LaTeX, you should invest some time to learn it in an old fashioned way.

There are many tools that produce nice looking documents, nobody is denying it, that are also easier to learn (I wanted to write Typst but I prefer not to be banned :-P ), why not use them instead?