I have gripes about Aria. It's definitely possible to abuse this stuff and end up with an inaccessible mess, but overall we have been trending toward a more accessible internet and things like the aforementioned do exist.
I've been blind since birth. I started on a device called the Braille 'N Speak 2000, which functioned very much like Emacs. I don't use Emacs because Emacspeak requires Linux desktop and adds a ton of extra complexity on top for very little gain. Linux dropped the ball big time on accessibility and audio in general, and never really recovered. Obviously this is opinionated, but I feel like you're implying that I lost my vision later in life and am forming my opinion around that perspective. You might additionally want to look into Jaws and NVDA. Learning those is about as bad as learning Emacs or etc; knowledge from when you were sighted doesn't transfer in the slightest and the interface is much more arcane than you probably imagine it to be.
This is off topic, and I don't want to distract from the current conversation, but speaking of sheets -- as a web developer, I often build SVG charts with d3, and I've been racking my brain lately trying to figure out how to make them more accessible to blind users beyond just linking to tables of data.
If you're using Sheets, are you also regularly consuming charts as well? Is there a common auditory shorthand for representing something like a pie chart?
For Sheets, the underlying stuff that runs it is quite complicated. They ended up doing something akin to an offscreen model with HTML to make it work because afaik they use a canvas of some sort to draw everything. In fact, unless you turn on braille mode, both products actually have a built-in screen reader that talks via aria live regions. That's terrible practice, but to their credit they got ahead of what the internet was providing for accessibility and didn't have a choice in that regard.
For something you can practically implement without a huge project, I suggest text descriptions of the data. If you want to do a bit better, make it an HTML table--that'll give some convenient navigability for free.
There's also a difference between those who acquire perceptive limitations (sight, hearing, also motor control, etc.) later in life, whether through accident, injury, illness, or degeneration, and those who have limitations from birth or a young age. Having to learn some (admittedly arcane) interface such as emacs late in life, with fewer capabilities and often declining cognitive capabilities, is difficult.
And yes, mainstream commercial software and OS offerings are improving. Slighty. (Most are still abysmally poor.)
I'm hard-pressed, though, to see how an increased dependence on dynamic and programmatic web design elements improves accessibility. Especially when wielded by technologists, managers, and clients with little awareness or concern for such access.
Again: Google should be much better positioned to grasp this than most. They clearly don't.