I think this may well be a case of Maslow's Law of the Instrument, i.e. When all you have is a hammer, it's tempting to treat everything as if it were a nail.
Most people, teachers included, are more or less comfortable with using MS Office. It's been around for nearly 30 years & it's been on school curricula & library learning aids & tutorials for at least a couple of decades. I think it'd be hard to find anyone who hasn't had to use it or even anyone who hasn't had some kind of instruction on using it.
What happened? There was a pandemic. Everyone had to go online to continue their classes. What was the easiest tool to use? The one they knew best that somehow did the job, one way or another: MS Office or something closely resembling it, e.g. Google Docs (renamed for education & a few extra GUIs & scripts added). I'm really not surprised at all that this is what has happened. I remember a number of pundits predicting it from the outset.
Familiarity with MS Office also meant that admins, teachers, students, & parents had a lot more knowledge & skills to work with from the outset & so MS Office/Google Docs enabled them to focus more on the learning content rather than the UI.
Yes, if we'd had time to prepare (any) LMS', courses, & resources in advance & train admins, teachers, students, & parents how to use them, we'd probably have better organised & collated resources & activities, & better learning outcomes than at present & everyone spending less time doing mindlessly repetitive & poorly organised admin tasks that LMS' typically automate.
And I very much doubt we'll be sufficiently prepared when/if the next pandemic strikes. Niccolo Machievelli wrote about how he was dismayed at how disinterested people were in preparing for predictable disasters, i.e. floods that occurred regularly, back in 1513. Things don't seem to have changed much since then. There have been realistic predictions from experts about coronavirus pandemics for at least the past decade & we've had plenty of experiences of pandemics in the past, enough to know that lock-downs are pretty much inevitable with highly contagious viruses: https://www.businessinsider.com/people-who-seemingly-predicted-the-coronavirus-pandemic-2020-3
Rolling out the edTech is relatively easy. The real challenge for online & distance education is building institutional & system wide capacity for being able to use LMS' & edTech tools effectively. I had a really easy time with getting Spanish students to use Moodle because most of them had used it at their schools & universities. Getting people in Canada used to using it is somewhat more of a challenge. I can't tell people about how distance education works & discuss options; I have to create mock-ups & give demonstrations for most people to even grasp the basics. I think we're still at the early 1990's stage of adoption, similar to when MS Office was still a strange, new, intriguing thing.
Just my $0.02
