Yes, back in the 90s, I used to have to create documents with numbered paragraphs. As a particular job evolved, paragraphs would get inserted or moved or removed and the Word of the day was not good at maintaining the number in those circumstances. The answer was to created the document without numbers then apply numbering afterwards.
That worked out fine until we upgraded to Word 95 at which point the whole numbering function completely collapsed and has never worked in a coherent way since, so far as I know!