To surmise from your article:
* "It gets in the way. If I open my article in a text editor, I want to see the title, author, abstract and first paragraph."
* You feel forced to use it. " One idiot reviewer told me, as a supposedly legitimate critique of my work: “this wasn’t written in TeX”. PhD students are forced to learn it"
Some of your points about escape codes etc. seem contrived, and the alternatives are just more buttons hidden in menus or a bunch of search. I'm not defending \’e but TBH that seems pretty darn logical compared to e.g. hitting a keycombo and searching through a million characters in a unicode table.
The first is a matter of a good editor, the second is true of any system you can be asked to use. I've been forced to use some pretty miserable programs in the past, so I can commiserate.
Hmm. As a PhD student you feel constrained to do something in a way you don't want to. I don't think that's a good enough reason to say something sucks, though. Why do PhD students use it? I'm not one, but I can suspect an answer - print journals. You can/could submit a TeX article and have it relatively seamlessly typeset into a for-print journal.
I don't work with print - I imagine if I did I might seriously consider TeX, and if parts of it legitimately sucked, seek to replace or modify those. Markdown is good enough for the majority of what I need to do. Microsoft Word is my "useless disease program" that all good "computer workers" are forced into using, and they become proud they know how to use templates and bullet formats. For what I typically use documents for, I would tell someone to use TeX before I told them to use Word, a quirky mess of program filled with bugs from a toxic work culture (and I don't need TeX so I don't use it).
:)