I think the fatal flaw is that there is no upgrade path towards sanity. If I start from a jupyter notebook or a script or whatever, it's trivial to build upon i

I think the fatal flaw is that there is no upgrade path towards sanity. If I start from a jupyter notebook or a script or whatever, it's trivial to build upon it. In Excel it's just an endless descent into madness. All those funky features are just bandaids over a fundamentally wrong abstraction. We have to acknowledge it's pretty much the only real tool for citizen developers out there, and as such it deserves some credit. But I don't really think it has any real advantage over $(your favorite scripting language); if you are proficient at coding I don't see why you would implement anything nontrivial in Excel given the choice. The truly infuriating thing is that it wouldn't take much for spreadsheets to become literal 10x magic, but it's one of those path-dependent things. Sad.