The learning curve is actually pretty manageable.
Took me an afternoon to be good enough to create lab reports for Uni. Creating your first template takes a bit but isn't super hard. Afterwards you can reuse that and only need to tweak.
This is the Tutorial I used.
For an editor I'd suggest VSCode with LaTeX Workshop. (There's also LTeX which is a great grammar and spelling checker)
I second this, haven't used the tutorial, I just learned by doing in the beginning and than took a course at Uni, which was really good and got me all the way to quickly being able to set up my own templates and quickly get a document done.
LaTeX workshop with vscode is also great, however if you're a (neo)vim user already, give https://www.github.com/lervag/vimtex a try, it's an awesome plugin and works flawlessly, especially when combined with zathura as pdf reader.
I just wrote a book in Latex and it's really easy. You just learn as you go. The only problem was when a publisher required a docx-document. It was possible using pandex, but my end notes were all screwed up.