The simplest argument is that if your job requires you to share documents with other people who are used to using Office document formats as their standard exchange medium, then unless you convince those people to move away from that format -- which may require either moving everyone else they exchange documents away from that format, or treating you as a special snowflake -- you're stuck.

If you're in a tech space full of plain text document formats, dealing with folks who love Markdown and use programmer-centric diff tools, all of this can certainly be irrelevant. (I'm in that space in my day job and with personal projects that don't involve other people.) But for a lot of, well, office jobs, that's a non-starter. And Google Docs, while it has some great things to recommend it, doesn't have the feature set Office does. (There's a long-standing observation that while most users only use 20% of Microsoft Word's features, for any two given users that 20% may not be identical.)

I work with fiction editors, and I need to be able round-trip manuscripts with embedded comments and revision tracking. Google Docs doesn't cut it for me. Actually, none of the OO-based suites (LO, AOO or NeoOffice) were able to round-trip transparently with Microsoft Word in my admittedly limited testing back in 2014, although that may no longer be the case. (They all have the required functionality, but bits and bobs of formatting and metadata would go away when the document moved from LO to Word back to LO.)

tl;dr: LibreOffice will matter as long as Microsoft Office matters, and whether we like it or not, in an awful lot of the business world, Microsoft Office still matters a whole lot.

i think a fairly good benchmark is that those entities which _require_ ms-word will be the ones that tend to disappear over the course of the next 5-10 years.

It'd be a very interesting argument, if you could provide statistics to back up the notion that Office products today are really as marginal as you make it out to be. I'd expect them to be comparably central to corporate and civil service jobs in the economy in total as ever, just because economy in bulk is a very sluggish thing and they do the job, but I'd be thrilled to be wrong.

It matters if you have years of documents that you still need to be able to view/edit. Not everyone wants to upload these documents to an online service (i.e. google docs), so having a free option that is not tied into any monthly subscriptions is nice. Sometimes it's just nice to keep things local and not have to rely on the "cloud".

So open them in LibreOffice?

GP was referring to Libre too.

I still use LibreOffice for my day-to-day word processing and (limited) spreadsheet needs. I'd greatly prefer for it to continue functioning well.

Is there a "just the basics" mode for LO? I do a formatted doc so infrequently that I often have to relearn how to do even the most minimal thing.

I've submitted at least one resume in plain .txt, and got the job.

I maintain my resume in .rst (and render it to .pdf via LO for now). Depending on the employer, it's conceivable that I could submit the .rst file.

As for "formatted" docs, I wish we could settle on some common version of .rtf. That's more than good enough for what most people really need to do.

Heck, even most email clients do pretty good formatting. It'd be nice if we could commonly write docs in our email client, and save to .pdf or .rtf or .someformat. (Now someone's going to tell me I can do that.)