TeX/LaTex has revolutionized technical publishing, enabling the easy (and free) typesetting of very complex documents. Its strange to cast it as "jargon and style canon" and does not help the rest of your argument.
Its like saying that carpenters are using their toolkit to merely signal professionalism.
In fact the same ambiguity applies to in certain cases to the original post (see my other comment). If people are forced to use a certain communication technology / form by technical or legal reasons then this is not a good example of in-group/out-group. Such examples are much better served by discretionary choices.
It's only the core hard sciences that use LaTeX. Mathematics, computer science, physics, part of statistics, part of economics, part of engineering. When you move away from this core to e.g. chemistry, biology, applied physics, then it's all MS Word.