Ironically, around that same time, Word for Windows 2.0 was IMHO the peak of that product’s functionality, in that while it allowed the user to randomly apply styling to the text, it was the last version that made the template facilities an equal first-class citizen in the UI.  It was almost as easy to define and use “semantic” styles for formatting as it was to just do inline markup.  Version 6 (they went from 2 to 6 in one hop) bent the product firmly towards use by amateurs, with toolbar buttons for bulleted lists, etc, that hid the underlying use of styles, and thus avoided users incrementally learning how to do consistent documents.  From my perspective, every release since has made it worse.