I feel the major issue with excel (and other stuff such as CSS) is that one learns by cobbling things together and never through a formal process.
This means you end up inventing things that kinda work but you often don't use the tool the way it was intended.
This is literally all programming, and it's not necessarily a bad thing. As long as you keep learning and don't just keep doing the same cobbled together mess for years and years
Many of the people who write CSS or use Excel have never read a book about CSS or Excel.
It is a database though, one that is very accessible to most savvy people (aka, your domain experts) and you should lean on that instead of pushing them out. At least at smaller scales.
One day I discovered "Record Macro". That was handy to automate some simple tasks. Then I discovered I could make a clickable button, that would activate one of my macros. That was great. Then I discovered I could double-click (iirc) the button and there, in front of my eyes, was the code. A whole world opened up to me.
I made gigantic programs. Thousands of lines of code. Horrific code. I didn't understand variables or arrays but I had cells and columns! Imagine that.
I became the automation guru at my job. God I hope those Excel files no longer exist. I would die of embarrassment. I built automation tools in my own time. In Excel, of course. Before long I was making enough to quit my day job. Thanks, Excel.