I've formatted ~100 non-scientific books with LaTeX, including poetry and experimental/avant-garde fiction that makes considerable layout demands. I have yet to run into a problem that could not be solved. It isn't always the best tool for the job — for layouts with lots of images that need to be precisely placed with text, something like Affinity Publisher or InDesign would be a shorter path to the right result — but it's an amazing and remarkably painless system. If you are producing "incredibly inelegant bloat code" with it, I'd hazard that something other than LaTeX itself is responsible.