I requested a code snippet and instructions for work, I got an email, with a word document attached.

In the word document there was a screenshot of the code I needed.

Was their office under a rock somewhere? How had none of them stumbled upon what every other programmer in the world does?

Man that's wild. There were devs sending these instructions?

My first like real programming job, in 2019, version control was "download the project from the share drive, update the code, then add your new code back to the share with todays date in the folder name".

Everyone, except 1 dude liked SVN or mercurial, wanted the boss to just get us on git. It became the general standard for a reason. None of us liked the version control system we had, but HDD space was cheap so the boss wasn't that concerned.

I wouldn't do version control that way, but I've used Word to keep track of what I'm working on during integration tasks. It's nice because you can drop in code, error messages, and screen captures. E.g.: the tool looks like this: (image) but gives an error like this: (error message) and I think the problem is in file.py around lines XYZ: (code snippet) when I run the command (command used), and I think the answer is in (a couple links I found).

why not both

They're even doing an eager supervillain hand rub in the photo, delighting in the pain they're about to inflict.

The docx is silent.

I think LibreOffice Writer does that too.

Not if Microsoft have deleted it off your computer.