Yep. The late 90's and early 2000's was littered with people trying to make "light" copies of MS Word. The problem is that journalists need the wordcount feature, and teachers need the wordart feature. Remove either, you lose a demographic.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.
That's exactly the point of this approach. Don't try to solve everybody's use cases like Word. Target one specific group and make the product faster and easier to use by removing all unused features.
Word is a special case and I don't think the model works there - not least because users need an industry standard for content interchange, and it's very hard to build a 100% compatible Word clone.
But there are a lot of opportunities elsewhere to make products that are faster, simpler, cheaper, and more useful than the current industry standards.
Word is not a special case, it's just people getting used to it and that's all. If tomorrow Microsoft goes belly up and their office suite will be dropped by everybody due to always discovered vulnerabilities Libre Office will pick-up quite nicely. I have yet to find a feature of Word that I can't find its equivalent in Libre.
But Libre is a massive product was well, with a tremendous number of work hours put into it over decades. We're talking about alternatives that are nimble and have fewer features.
That's sort of Google Docs/Sheets/Slides TBH (in addition to being hosted/shared). I'm not really a "power user" of any of these tools anymore. I use them a lot but I don't do anything fancy. That said, if Docs didn't have, say, a word count feature, that would be a major annoyance.
That having been said, there are a lot of products out there that made their product intending it to be free, and then when they hit 1m users they started thinking "hmmm, if I could get a dollar out of every user, I could buy a house". They try to stuff a monetization model in sideways and damage their product in the process. Taking a moderately successful product that's crippled by attempting to shoehorn in monetization and redesigning it to have reasonable monetization from the beginning might be a better strategy.