Excel and its open source variants achieved total market dominance by providing a seemingly future proof technology platform and a generally maintainable (usually by a single human) solution for business. The biggest hurdle with converting these programmable documents into applications has always been long term the maintainability of the replacement solution. Even Microsoft had it's fair share of failures developing simple programmable database solutions (Access, Visual Fox Pro) to meet the needs of businesses and governments that "just needed a little more than what Excel could provide". It's a marketing pitch that never fails because it underplays the cost of maintenance of the new solution and the real value of the spreadsheet.
I welcome solutions that serve this need for "better than excel" without succumbing to its pitfalls but I'm not holding my breath. Even this article just outlines a solution that could be implemented in Excel with a little extra knowledge from the user, making it "no better than excel" for the specified use case.
Interestingly, Excel et al. achieved that status without the "no-code/low-code" mantra that is the rage in sales these days, where "citizen developers" are expected to relish in GUI editors severely limited in the logic they can accomplish.
On a turing-completeness spectrum, they live on the opposite half of where VBA+formulas stand proudly. Therefore, it is no surprise that for anything beyond "out-of-the-box", it is expected that an experienced IT developer/consultant will be needed to figure something out.
A decent reason to disallow custom code is that these platform are to be upgraded regularly, yet every major version seems to bring its lot of breaking changes while my decade-old macros still run like a champ. Oh the irony.
I welcome solutions that serve this need for "better than excel" without succumbing to its pitfalls but I'm not holding my breath. Even this article just outlines a solution that could be implemented in Excel with a little extra knowledge from the user, making it "no better than excel" for the specified use case.