At many places there's also some nasty politics around siloing where a database is an IT System so it has to be owned by the centralized IT organization, operat

At many places there's also some nasty politics around siloing where a database is an IT System so it has to be owned by the centralized IT organization, operated by a DBA team, have a budget, be audited by security, etc. and half of those groups look down on Access and want to architect for job security by picking some Oracle/SAP product where even if you have an unlimited budget you are looking at years of guaranteed delay before you can use it with a significant risk of failure. In a fair number of places that I've worked the finance and IT departments have a fairly substantial level of enmity which also discourages use of anything which involves them. Meanwhile, everyone still needs to do their jobs and there's a business analyst with decent Excel chops who will have something you can use “temporarily”. A few years pass, then a few more, and now everything lives in Excel as the calcified scar tissue of broken official processes…