I’d like to make a radical proposal to deprecate the LaTeX template. LaTeX eats a massive amount of time and I think is a huge barrier to participation. I am very experienced with it (I wrote my PhD thesis in it), and concluded that it has a very large number of downsides that I don’t need to enumerate here. I do recognise that with a large amount of work, mentoring and hours of forum-surfing it can produce nice-looking output (not with latex which I find always looks bad, but xelatex output with a nice font can look great), but then I suspect that the reason some people like it so much is because it is difficult to use and they enjoy gatekeeping.
Although I don’t use word myself, certainly removing the word template in favour of the LaTeX one would turn off many people from submitting, and greatly impact the interdisciplinary nature of the conference.
The only forward-thinking option I know of is ‘academic’ markdown processed with pandoc (preferably using xelatex). I’ve run a conference with markdown and word options, take-up was 50-50 and I had no support requests for either, apart from one person who had issues because they’d converted the markdown to LaTeX. That was in 2015, and the markdown tools have only improved since then.
This is what pubpub does under the hood, but with its shortcomings I think it would work better to give clear instructions to people to use it directly. I think the worst thing about pubpub is that it’s open source in theory, but in practice you can’t self-host or develop it, so in practice it is not.
Edit: the conference I refer to is ICLC, and the current hosts are supporting markdown templates as well.