You can using VBA functions and VBScript.RegExp. This is restricted to Windows though. Microsoft wants to get rid of VBScript, so maybe they are going through the most common use cases in Excel.
Yes, but that doesn't include getting rid of VBA. They probably do want to do that though, to allow mobile apps and web-based Excel to run interactive sheets using Javascript. Of course they've been trying for years to allow Javascript in Excel, but at least in the first versions that ran using Internet Explorer in the background. I'm not sure if that has evolved further now.
