Part of the problem, highlighted in the article: Users don't set the data type of the column off of "General". So it tries to figure out the data type on entry.

Part of the problem, highlighted in the article: Users don't set the data type of the column off of "General". So it tries to figure out the data type on entry. Setting the column to use a specific type ("Text"), keeps it from trying to use heuristics to figure out that something is a date. Something more recent is the introduction into Excel of Power Query, which lets you import a CSV and apply arbitrary transformations (such as applying a type), before it hits the workbook, so if you need to pull in a CSV, you can do so, and it will always be imported the same way.