The main problem with Google Sheets for that use case IIUC is that it's designed to be prepared for any of the users to edit arbitrary cells which can cause recomputations of other arbitrary cells, and it wants to give real-time feedback to all the other users about every edit (and cursor movement). That makes it harder to scale up to many simultaneous editors without compromises in the backend (due to the graph of recalculations) and UI (clutter, contention to claim the first blank line).

A custom web app for this purpose can scale better by being designed with the knowledge each user only edits their own row and nothing else needs to be recalculated. And of course it can have a tailored UI.

Unfortunately I don't know of any way for a non-developer to match that. There's no fundamental reason IMHO that there couldn't be a nice rapid, code-optional CRUD app generator, like Microsoft Access for the 21st century. Maybe this is what Microsoft Lists will do? AirTable is a general-purpose web-based RDBMS frontend, but I don't know if it scales well to many simultaneous editors either, I don't think you can tailor the UI as much as I'd like, and I hear folks complaining about database size limits.

You can get Google Sheets to scale better, but it's a bit awkward:

* Give folks a Google Forms link to edit their own information. This atomically claims and populates the row.

* Give folks a publish link (see File | Publish To the Web) to view everyone else's information. This link scales well because it doesn't let them update anything and (more annoyingly) it doesn't show changes until they hit refresh.

For surveying-type requests you should probably be using a Google Form which links to a Sheet (with limited access control). You shouldn't be giving everyone simultaneous edit access to the document.

A google form that inserted the links into a public but read-only sheet would have performed fine I'm guessing