Yes, I don't think Excel product owners are focusing on professional development, just power users. So things like the formula bar are lackluster. There is also a formula stepper that's mostly useless for debugging.

I played with them and even tried to build a minikanren, but on my day to day job I just use them tactically, so I avoid their limitations and I'm quite happy with them for that.

From memory:

  - Recursion is severely limited in lambda.
  - There are extra pains when putting formulas on the name manager or on conditional formatting (although more focused on references than on lambdas in particular, usage of lambda would be more powerful if they didn't exist)
  - You can't do arrays of arrays, so your data structures need to be flat