Power Query / Power BI is pretty much that, treating spreadsheets as one source among others, with transformations and analytics on top.

ODBC is decades old

This is a double edge sword, because often time there is no one validing the results of the spread sheets...

"The number looks ok" is not a good validation, and there has been some very public data errors as a result of bad spreadsheets.

I often wondered if in the average business is even 10% of the spreadsheets where actually audited what would happen.... I suspect the results would be rather shocking

I'm not sure if I should be proud of this or not, but once I had some pretty critical field values in a Excel spreadsheet that I had to make sure were compatible with my code. I ended up adding some derived formulas in a new locked sheet within the file, committed the XLSX to Git and then created a JUnit test to make sure everything was in sync. In a nutshell, the XLSX became the source of truth

Yup, and this is frequently a total disaster. Like, hundreds of thousands of dollars get lost either in spreadsheet errors or by paying the salaries of people who manage spreadsheets when their jobs could probably be replaced by a much better solution.

But, whatever - more work for everyone! Certainly suits me. It's like wanting the average person to keep programming C because you're in infosec.

Indeed, and I think this is the real problem with non-programmer/data people working with spreadsheets. The problem isn't the spreadsheet interface itself. The problem is that people are doing what amounts to engineering without any training in engineering and no sense of best practices.