Well when you deal with merge conflicts in Word, your standard tool is Word. I don't think you can get much more standard than Office when you consider collaborators outside academia. It's not great for simultaneous editing (although I think this is now possible in 365).
It is, however, very good for tracking changes over versions. Many academics are not familiar with git, diff and so on and it's nice to easily see historical edits in the document. For simple documents like abstracts, it's much easier to send a Word document than it is to send a tex file and assume that everyone on consortium is going to be able to compile it (especially if you work with industry).
It would want to have improved since I used it a couple years ago in Word 2013. The main problem was with citation managers - Word would give a paragraph lock to you whenever you edited a paragraph, and it would only unlock that paragraph after a save (either auto or manual). Of course, when you have a citation manager, they have the habit of changing all the paragraphs when you insert a new citation that changes the numbering (ie. [1] becomes [2], etc.).
It is, however, very good for tracking changes over versions. Many academics are not familiar with git, diff and so on and it's nice to easily see historical edits in the document. For simple documents like abstracts, it's much easier to send a Word document than it is to send a tex file and assume that everyone on consortium is going to be able to compile it (especially if you work with industry).