Spreadsheets are to Finance folk what WordPress is to Marketing folk and what tools like v0 and other LLM-powered web app builders are to Product folk. The promise of having some fancy schmancy technological tool let you do your job by yourself and without needing to collaborate with other people is basically the strongest value proposition that you can make to working professionals.
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, most 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".
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, most 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".