I worked in corporate environments for decades.
The original comment I responded to said they regularly imported large data sets and the in the case of the genetists they also are regularly importing data into Excel. In other words Excel is a regularly used and fundamental tool to their work. In this case I would expect someone to learn the basics of using it. Just as I would expect a developer to learn their editor, build system, version control system, etc.
Do you/have you worked in a corporate environment? You seem to have an idealistic view about how end users are expected to use Excel.