But is that really the right comparison? Lots of people just don't have the skills or time to build a specific applications. Without Excel, what would they do? There are some places where a 90% solution is worse than no solution at all (at least no solution is a forcing function for a "real" application), and in many ways Excel isn't the best expression of the _idea_ of an Excel-like, low-barrier-to-entry declarative programming environment with a built-in UI, but it's truly a wonderful tool. It makes a lot of automation possible for a lot of people.
And often the easiest way to try a few things and communicate the idea is by prototyping it with a spreadsheet.
Also - 15 digit NUMBER precision leading to truncated values that you only discover when it's too late; no Macro undo; no way I'm aware of to transform columns/rows from formulas to their values without intermediate cut/paste steps; lots of essential features (like "Copy only visible range containing hidden cells") buried in Find & Select > Go To Special menu without keyboard shortcuts; Excel's magic ability to change cell data types by merely touching a CSV (open/closing without saving changes)...
There's some real doozies out there. The Reinhart-Rogoff error, which was used to justify imposing austerity on Greece [0]. The UK's COVID tracing fiasco [1]. The list goes on. People using Excel have no business making decisions that affect other people's lives.
[0] https://stanfordreview.org/clarifying-the-implications-of-th...
Probably the worst example I've seen first-hand was an entire retail banking loan-approval process running off of a single, shared, gigantic spreadsheet, that hundreds had tinkered with, but no-one understood or took responsibility for, and where the accompanying Word document of "things not to do" was bigger than the workbook.
Even yesterday, a friend of mine discovered they'd underclaimed expenses for a total >$1,000 due to a dodgy spreadsheet. Something as simple as pasting a list of dollar amounts from a webpage into Excel can produce an incorrect SUM() if/when trailing spaces creep in, since the resulting values may be treated as strings and evaluate to zero - and so it had transpired. Not even "text to columns" could fix it; you have to a) know about this lurking monster, b) use formatting to make it casually evident, and c) use Replace to strip the whitespace. What a crock.