If you have fairly sophisticated formatting needs, like if you’re writing technical papers with formulae, the latex is a help. For most authors, who are in the business of writing words (not formatting documents) latex offers nothing.
\documentclass{article}
\begin{document}
<your words here>
\end {document}
is pretty lightweight and distraction-free. Substitute the appropriate documentclass for whatever thing you're working on (book, report, whatever), and it will just work, provided you're willing to accept a lot of default formatting.
Once you get into twiddling formatting, then you're back in the realm of non-distraction-free writing, but that's not the tool's fault.
LaTeX is relevant if you use it as part of your tool chain. That's like saying "Markdown isn't relevant; the text editor is." No. They're both relevant.
In grad school (philosophy) I found Latex (via Markdown/pandoc) let me focus on writing words and do styling/layout of my papers (and keeping the bibliography consistent) as a separate task.
