The sad thing is I’ve encountered funky compatibility issues just between current versions of word. Going from Office 2022 (I think. I honestly can’t remember their LTSC office releases off the top of my head at all) to M365 triggered some minor formatting changes, and going from local word document to one that’s shared on SharePoint completely fucked up all of the images in the document and required many hours of rearranging the images because word still sucks for desktop publishing
Image handling has definitely gotten better in the last 10 years or so, but realistically you can get everything you want done with Word 2003 today