a kilo of saucepans (rakslice)LB: it feels more ironic reading about DTP history in center left justified sans serif blobg than other topics
and it touches on it ("I almost can't believe I used to lay out 80-page magazines in it." you and me both buddy) but wikipedia puts it more succinctly: "[...] and, by 1998, PageMaker had lost almost the entire professional market [...]"
But I think I used ventura from back when it required a gem standalone install before I even saw pagemaker... when I did the first thing you noticed is that it was weird that they had eschewed what all the other page layout software bothered to do
Like, considering the history, and with the benefit of hindsight, you can sort of see why doing it that way was good enough in the 80s when your differentiation was wysiwyg and then through user familiarity and the sort of inertia of not wanting to revisit features they already shipped they were stuck with it
To be clear I'm talking about what it's referring to in "The text workflow is too much of a PITA to do anything longer than a few pages;": pagemaker didn't have a concept of the layout of text separate from the actual text copy filling in those parts of the layout, so if you edited the actual text, pagemaker modified the text object positioning while you did it, which if that broke your layout,
for instance by lengthening the text area in some direction where it wasn't supposed to go, you then had to go back and manually fix it