Excel for all its faults is easy for beginners to pick up. Semi-technical people can quickly hack together a bug-ridden prototype of their ideas. In most companies the alternative is not well-written software, but spending countless meetings to get IT to spend millions to provide a bug-ridden prototype in a few years time.
One of the main problems with Excel as I can see it is that it is effectively a write-only language. Auditing an Excel sheet is famously almost impossible. And that's before you add VBA in the mix.
Since I mentioned PHP: one of the best things I can say about the language and its ecosystem is that they made it really easy to add a 'web-counter' to your otherwise late 90s static html-only page on shared hosting. You begin with a web-counter, and then just keep on copy-and-pasting.. Haskell is not nearly that easy to pick up, even if you are prepared to do it badly.
People use Excel when they should really use a database, they use it because they want to format something on a 2-d grid, edit tabular data, make plots, do calculations, make projections, etc.
The problems go down to the data structures in use.
For instance there is nothing 2-dimensional about financial reports (and projections), really financial reports are hyperdimensional. Proper handling of dates and times is absolutely critical. Also the use of floating point with a binary exponent is a huge distraction in any kind of math tools aimed at ordinary people. (Mainframes got that right in the 1960s!)
Google Sheets is just a stripped down version of Excel and other than the ability for multiple people to work on it simultaneously, is really no better.