Although most users of LaTeX are in the STEM fields, they're also way too busy with actual research to find joy in dicking around with command-line tools.
I think the computer field is unusual in that computer people think everyone must be dying to learn The Way even if it costs them time and (from their perspective at least) risks significant losses. Doctors advise diet and exercise, but don't find it puzzling when people don't.
I can work from any device in any little snippet of time I have available, and all I need is a browser. That flexibility allowed me to make progress even with a job and two kids. I submitted my first paper recently, and I don't think I would have ever gotten traction without the convenience of overleaf.
I can make small edits on my phone, and more importantly reread it to find errors. If I think of something at work, I can open in a tab. I can send my current draft to someone so they can add feedback inline. I can make changes based on their feedback, and don't have to resend them anything. Informal reviewers don't have to keep track of versions of my document, going to the url is always the most recent.
Even more importantly, setting up and maintaining a latex installation may not be a lot of time, but if you don't have much time, it becomes a bigger fraction of it. It's a big activation energy to get over if you don't have a lot of energy.
If you are writing papers regularly, then you may find it worth it, or easy to invest in your own setup. If you aren't, it is a lot to manage.
I've used ShareLaTeX before, and it's sort of the same reason why Dropbox is (sometimes) better than using rsync. Yes, I would prefer to edit everything in Vim but personally LaTeX environments have always been more pain to setup than they've been worth, and ShareLaTeX just works.
Also they support collaborative editing and adding editor notes to a document.
Yeah, but I find that nothing really matches the real Vim or Neovim. Especially since I have a lot of macros and mappings configured that make editing documents in "Vim-like" editors feel more painful because my muscle memory tries to use macros that aren't defined.
Both sharelatex and overleaf support git. You can pull/push directly to their sites or pair them to a GitHub repo iirc.
It's significantly easier to do collaborative editing of latex files with such a web service. But even a single person might want to use them, because maintaining latex dependencies can be bothersome.
A local MiKTeX installation handles this beautifully (MiKTeX is a LaTeX distribution which comes with a bare set of default packages, and then downloads packages from the internet transparently upon compilation if they're necessary).
It can be a lift to get non-computer-savvy folks to use a highly-managed system like ShareLatex (which is a great system). But it would be impossible (not merely difficult) to do so if "just use git for collaboration" is your message!
If a lot of your documents are collaborative, this turns out to be a major factor. (For my personal work, I'm happy to use Emacs and TeXshop and keep all files resident on my laptop.)
I recently typeset a (stunning looking) master thesis for a friend and she was able to edit the text while I dealt with formatting, setting stuff up, etc. (Well for that project, also big props to pandoc [1], as it easily converted docx to tex including footnotes!)
Otherwise it's nice, because I set up shared projects with good looking CVs for some non-tech friends and even a template to write nice looking letters/invoices and they know what to change and how and I could hide most of the stuff going on in template files.
LaTeX is from the 80s. I understand it has grown over time, but to >1GB? That's huge, even for modern standards, for just a typesetting program. The documentation is a dependency that seems to be forced on you (it's not an optional dependency in Debian), and fonts are also big. But even without that, you're left with about 600MB if I recall correctly which is still huge for just formatting text right?
But it's not "just" a typesetting program. The TeXlive installation includes a huge amount of packages, supporting all kinds of typesetting, including maths, music sheets, pictures (TikZ), support for making posters, presentations, various little enhancements like microtype etc. etc.
I am quite happy to dedicate 1GB to that. Especially in a world, where random websites tend to dump 3-4MB on me (with liberal use of adblockers) to render a few paragraphs of text.
I've been able to write European proposals using LaTeX only because I adopted ShareLaTeX quickly. Other researchers might appreciate the auto-formatting and indexing, but a complicated install procedure is too much to ask. Perfect compromise because I vehemently deny to use Word for complicated documents.
Although most users of LaTeX are in the STEM fields, they're also way too busy with actual research to find joy in dicking around with command-line tools.
I think the computer field is unusual in that computer people think everyone must be dying to learn The Way even if it costs them time and (from their perspective at least) risks significant losses. Doctors advise diet and exercise, but don't find it puzzling when people don't.