Not to defend Word et. al. too much, they have plenty of problems, but keeping the structure simple and applying a style over it is a completely supported way of doing things.

I have documents with essentialy zero direct styling, just paragraph styles (for headings, bullets, code blocks, quotes) and character styles (links, inline code). The UI isn't super well optimized for that, but once you get used to it, it's so much nicer than Markdown or LaTeX for multi-page print work.