From watching people write their thesis in both latex and word, I'd say if anything it is the other way around. The people who write their thesis in word (or another wysiwyg editor) spend more time on their layout than the people writing in latex. Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks, which allows people to get into the flow much more easily.
Sure, theoretically you can only concentrate on writing with word and ignore layout. In practice in takes a lot of discipline so instead you see people moving figures around putting spaces or returns to move a heading where they want to etc.. In particular as a way to procrastinate from actual writing.
> Worse, they spend the time while writing, while latex allows for separation of tasks,
I theory, yes. And that's also what I'm usually trying to do.
What I have observed though with Latex folks is that they type 3 words and then look at the preview or re-compile to see if it looks good.
I mean, as with code, the actual typing is not really the bottleneck.
I also basically read the right pane rendered output, but mostly as a "reading out what I've written and evaluating whether it sounds good" most of the time, not really messing with layouting (especially that LaTeX and Typst does that very well, I can be reasonably sure that my paragraphs will have decent hypens and such).