It's also technology was much less ubiquitous back then and less evenly distributed, at least in my experience.

I went from a mechanical typewriter which had the whiteout tape as it's only "advanced" feature, directly to a WYSIWYG editor. It was absolutely night and day. I only saw an "advanced" electronic typewriter later in life at my grandparents house, which was used rarely and only for her accounting business as it was so expensive when they first bought it.

As far as I know my experience was pretty much normal for my peer group - as my school had a similar setup. As a kid in school, it was amazing going from having to totally re-type a rough draft to being able to make some casual edits and hit print. Hours saved for each paper, especially with the typing skills I had back then!