I found myself pondering what it is that makes spreadsheets approachable. And i suspect it is because the state is up front, and one do not have to track variable names, scopes, and so on, in one's head.

Inputs are named based on what cells they are entered in, and the results are named from the cells the expression is housed in.

Never mind that the scope is by default the sheet, though one can access those in other sheets with a bit extra effort.

On top of this one get instant feedback when something is awry.

not entirely sure if it is possible to expand something like this into a more general purpose IDE though.

This is pretty much correct. Spreadsheets have two powerful ideas: (1) the show the data (one the Learnable Programming principles) and (2) they are inherently live.