Every single attempt to migrate to something else has been a comical failure. On the plus side they tend to be rapid failures rather than SAP style multi years

There's an immediacy to a spreadsheet: the user can start with very literal actions on data, and slowly introduce abstractions like formulae. In conventional programming, the programmer has nothing but abstractions with which to work.

It's reminiscent of one of Fred Brooks' remarks about how showing the data structures makes the algorithms obvious, but showing the algorithms reveals little about the data structures.

I even have done this first day's advent of code, and the first part of day two, in a Google sheet. Formulas only, so no scripting needed.

I worked at a place that used Google Workspace and the most effective people simply supplied their own Excel, because it's just way more efficient than spending hours learning how to use Google's clunky pivot table function, when you already know how to do it well with Microsoft.

Yes, it's awful in many ways, but it is very accessible to people who don't consider themselves programmers. "I just want to do my thing" is very easily done in a mashup of the spreadsheet and VBA.

We also forget the pain of learning a new technology. People whose first experience is excel also go through this. Shit doesn't do what you wanted. After a while, they can build stuff in excel, but they don't want to learn python, because there's more pain coming.

Most senior devs have transcended particular languages or technologies, so they don't see it. They pay a very small cost for picking up a new tool, so they scratch their heads when they see a guy who wants to run a trading book on a spreadsheet.

The fact that all these tools eventually fall apart at scale is basically irrelevant. You can only take away control from their cold, dead hands, and they will never learn the programming skills to build something more scalable themselves. All solutions almost invariably trend towards shifting scaling problems away from the desired frontend that keeps control (or at least the illusion of control) in the hands of business stakeholders (one of the reasons why companies love building all manner of integrations on top of Jira).

And let's be clear, it's not like the alternatives here (i.e. databases) are so easy. Finance folk are used to creating new spreadsheets on their local computer for free and at will; most databases require setting up a server, DNS, certificates, firewalls, all of which have real costs. SQLite naively sounds like a reasonable approach, but by default a table is limited to 2,000 columns while an Excel spreadsheet is by default limited to about 16,000 columns, and yes, stuff like this really matters when you're talking about trying to uproot a favored tool. At the end of the day, most of Excel's limitations are due to attempting to cram a spreadsheet into a single file (same as SQLite); if Microsoft were smart, they'd offer a cloud-only "spreadsheet" (really a database over a full filesystem, or maybe over object storage) without the limitations of ordinary Excel spreadsheets, where Excel-the-desktop-app only downloads to the local client the relevant cells that are actually in view, while adding more options to mirror/load data from external sources into other sheets attached to the same cloud-only "spreadsheet".