On the web there is an early screenshot of the Lyx software, https://www.linuxjournal.com/files/linuxjournal.com/linuxjournal/articles/013/1355/1355f3.jpg It shows the version 0.12 from 1999 which looks very strange. The main question the beginner in academic publishing probably has why he needs Lyx if MS-Word works great. To answer the question we must focus on the need of a scientific document.
The average academic paper which gets published at Arxiv and other repositories has some details which are important: citation of external literature, images, tables, hierarchical outline, footnotes. To make clear why these details are important, we can imagine a paper without these features, it will look not very elegant.
The problem is, how to create such features in a pdf document. On a formal level the features have something to do with positioning text on the screen. For example a hierarchical outline results into a table of contents and a big heading over a chapter, while an image is a pixel pattern located in or ontop of the screen. Producing these typographic benefits can be called advanced science. A normal text editor is not able to do so. In the history of book printing many efforts were undertaken to make this possible. For example, if someone is trying to use a simple typerwriter for producing a mathematical formula or a table he will run into problems.
In theory, MS-word can handle all these need. But only in theory. In reality, most papers published at Elsevier and Arxiv are not written in MS-Word. MS-Word is used only for the first draft, then a professional layout program is used for generate the pdf paper. It makes no sense to compare Lyx with MS-Word, the better approach is to compare Lyx with Adobe Framemaker and Indesign. The general question is not “Do we need Lyx?”, the question is: do we need Framemaker?
Let us take a look in current book publishing industry. The software Framemaker and Indesign is used by 99% of typesetters. The only exceptions are self-publisher in which most customers are delivering their pdf paper with MS-Word, but in professional typesetting the better choice is a product of Adobe. Now we can compare Lyx with these tool. Lyx is for free, and has a semantic tagging feature, that means, the formatting is done by the LaTeX backend. In my opinion, Lyx is superior to Adobe Framemaker and other software.
Is Lyx able to handle citations, footnotes, hierarchical outlines, tables and images? Yes, very well. The interesting aspect is, that on one hand the software is very powerful while at the same time the usage is easy. Critics are saying, that with Lyx / LaTeX every document looks the same. But that is not true. The general idea behind Lyx is, that is works like a pure ascii editor. The text can be exported as plaintext, and after it can be used in any other graphic program. That means, even if the author doesn't like the latex backend he can use Lyx for entering structured text, export it to plain text and then paste it in a graphic program. Under Linux, the Scribus software is a hot candidate for making fancy flyers.
Scribus is a bad choice for creating an academic looking paper and it take a very long time until one page is ready, because the user has to manually adjust everything. But if the idea is to positioning text and images freely on the screen, it is a good choice.
Monster
Sometimes, Lyx is called textlayout monster, because in early versions of Linux it was notorious difficult to install. Together with LaTeX, some pdf tools and a vector program the overall amount of discspace Lyx will consume can reach 1000 MB easily. And the number of possibilities the user has is endless. But over the times, Lyx has become more user-friendly. Today the interface looks clean and can be installed with a single command like “dnf install lyx”. I would call the software more easier to use then pure LaTeX, MS-Word or Adobe Framemaker. Everybody who ever tried out the software will never switch back to something different. If somebody is using Lyx and has nevertheless problems with academic writing it has nothing to do with layout questions, but with the content of the text.