Word docs have turned into Pages

Your Word documents may now bear the Pages icon on the documents as the operating system views Pages as the default opening application for them. The Word documents are still Word documents and not Pages documents.

Pages is not a Word clone and when Pages opens a Word document, it remains unchanged while Pages reads and attempts to translate the Word content into the Pages .pages document format. Unless you save that result once to preserve the Pages document, it will be lost upon quitting Pages.

Yes, a reinstall of Office 365 or Office 2021 for Mac on Ventura should do the trick. Current version of Word is 16.81.