Office 2019 / 365 on Mac is a universal App and in 2016 was re-written from scratch in native Cocoa. It runs very well indeed and it’s updated frequently. I don’t know the specifics of the particular workflow. But the only downside is that the Office for Mac apps are sandboxed so if your VBA / Macros / Add-ons access things outside of Word they may not work. If the 3rd party that created an Add-on doesn’t bother to support Mac then you’ll need to find an alternative. The Apps are sandboxed because they are in the App Store but can also be downloaded and installed from Microsoft but they are still coded to run in a sandbox.
There’s always more than one way to accomplish a goal and some of these workflows may have been cobbled together over the years using available tools but that doesn’t mean it’s the best way to do it. We had a metric ton of custom spreadsheets and MS Access databases and the like where some whizkid in a department built it and the whole department used it then the whizkid leaves the company and there is no one to support it. Unless you find a grizzled old engineer who happens to be having a really great day and they are bored, they might take a stab at peeling back the layers and tackling the mess under the hood. Eventually we started looking into all the business apps and eliminated redundancies and replaced multiple toolchains into modern web apps. So instead of a home grown app launching Word to generate a letter, we have a web app that generates a PDF hooked to a record in a cloud based database server. As time went on we eliminated a lot of these kludge solutions from decades ago. One such tool was a PTO time tracking Access database. We just installed the HR tool Workday and that offered the same functionality even better.
Personally, I find Word to be such a tangled mess that I can barely stand it. Pages is far easier but underpowered. I’ve taken to writing technical documentation in LaTeX and I can check the markup text files into a git code repository. I even found ways to automate it with various scripts and python. I can now crank out technical documentation and make it look amazing in PDF’s. The only trouble with LaTeX is the learning curve but it’s not all that bad. Once you have your templates set up the rest is inputting the content with minimal markup. If you have a programmers text editor it’s a piece of cake. But alas it is not for everyone. Yes, it does mathematic formula formatting exceptionally well. But it can do complex book layouts, presentations, pamphlets, etc. It is a very capable typesetting system.