Would you use for a 200-page product manual?
Handing it over to someone else to maintain is a different thing though. Products like InDesign or PageMaker or Word understand that this is what eventually happens in reality. So, the not-so-steep learning curves that WYSIWYG tools offer have won out in the end.
If the manual is written by techies, and maintained in-house like all those old Bell Labs manuals that used troff, then markup based typesetting is not such a pain, imho.