In my experience, the main problem is that while Excel "distributed code versioning" with a whole bunch of copies around is awful, Access databases are not only

In my experience, the main problem is that while Excel "distributed code versioning" with a whole bunch of copies around is awful, Access databases are not only much more prone to corruption and data loss in general (even in single user, non-simultaneous ideal use cases, never mind people attempting to multiplayer edit it over network shares...), it's often very hard for non-programmers to get any insights on any data you threw on it without using Excel in the first place. So if the data is coming from Excel, and being extracted back to Excel, why use anything besides Excel?