People often develop smallish CRUD apps in MS-Access in two weeks or less. It's up and going without fuss and muss and without fiddling with servers, containers, DBA's, etc.

You have to admire its nimbleness.

Yes, the database "crashes" fairly often, but it's easy to make frequent round-robin-style file-based backups using Windows Scheduler and DOS scripts.

Most databases cannot be properly backed up with file-based techniques because of syncing of internal pointers. But MS-Access's separate "lock-file" based technique somehow facilitates file-based backups.

Such MS-Access apps are far from perfect, but if you factor in everything, they seem to be a net benefit.

I'd probably do a web app myself

If follow-on maintainers don't know the web framework used, it can be hard to maintain. Web apps are rarely nimble to do without an involved framework on which the developer is familiar with. MS-Access avoids that problem with ubiquity and a light drag-and-drop learning curve. (It did get harder to learn when they went from coordinate-based to an HTML-esque flow engine around 2006.)

Let's face it, desktop GUI IDE's are usually much easier to learn than web stuff. You don't have to deal with the web's lack of state, and CSS/DOM/JS headaches/bugs/inconsistencies.

When I first learned MS-Access, I barely had to read the manual. I could discover most functionality by clicking around. With Base, I had to constantly dig in the manual and still couldn't get it to do many ordinary CRUD idioms.

I spent a couple decades as a power user of the MS Office suite and find that I can generally make Calc do what I need as a spreadsheet and even Writer as a word processor. However, pretty much every time I've tried to develop a solution in Base it turns into a fight and I end up throwing up my hands and going with a different database solution. Calc doesn't even work all that well with it... and it's one of the few applications that works with it at all.

Running on? Wait, you mean I have to get IT to set up a server for me? Who's responsible for maintaining that? Backups? They're going to do that for something used by only 10 people that saves us maybe 20-30 hours a week? How much are they going to charge my department for this?

I wonder whether today’s equivalent could be made on Raspberry Pi. It requires a few tricks, but there is so much demand from managers who could afford paying 50€ out of pocket.

Of course, having a rogue box plugged to the internal network with a Wifi and Bluetooth chip on board is not IT-approved. Can it be bypassed?