No, you're supposed to worry separately about formatting and content. I know that math-y people (I guess that means math, CS and physics people) think that just using the default settings is fine and those who are hit particularly hard with Stockholm syndrome sometimes even call it 'beautiful', but outside of that world, there is a stigma against papers formatted using just the default Latex (Tex?) settings. So wanting to use other fonts, more narrow margins and different header styles is something that should be if not easy, then at least within reach of even casual users. Which it isn't, right now. (in my experience, having tried to set up Latex and VCS-based authoring workflows several times with people who only took programming classes because they had to).

I think it's a legitimate wish to change the footer height in a document.

\setlength{\footskip}{length} should do the job. You might have to reduce the \textheight to make room. What are you trying to achieve?

I'd probably try the /setlength command, but not consider that I have to adjust the invisible /textheight. Then I would wonder why it did not work.

With HTML, at least I have the inspector to see where bounding boxes are. With latex I'm blind.

    \documentclass[a4paper]{article}
    \usepackage{layout}
    \begin{document}
    \layout{}
    \end{document}

Ought to sort you out. There’s also the showframe package.