Er, I think reality is closer to "they would be making significantly more money if they loved python more than Excel".
A wheelchair is a large clunky device that can't go up stairs or rocky hills. Legs are far more versatile. But it is incorrect to say that someone can go many more places if they didn't have the wheelchair.
The other half of folks are quite successful hedge fund, private equity and consultancy partner types, and I suspect those folks would not be making significantly more money if they had stopped using Excel and invested time in becoming DBAs, Data Scientists or accountants...
But if fully half (admittedly a subjective assessment on my part) of a tool's users would be better served by not using that tool for one reason or another--that's a pretty significant subset.
The spreadsheet jockey who just likes doing cool things with the data. Excel is just powerful enough to satiate this guy long enough for him to fall out of the habit of rethinking his workflow. If he had moved on earlier he'd be a DBA or a data scientist by now.
The other type is the small business owner who is pretty good at spreadsheets but whose business is outpacing his spreadsheets' ability to keep up.
On three separate occasions I've had this sort try to hire me to help find ways to make their workflow scalable, perhaps by helping them write a little custom software. The problem is usually that the time for finding an alternate method was years ago. The spreadsheets these people come up with are amazing, it's like they've tricked out their tricycle so much over the years that it can now fly, just not well.
They always want to pay for my spare time, but the complexity is always such that they need somebody full time.