Part of the problem, highlighted in the article: Users don't set the data type of the column off of "General". So it tries to figure out the data type on entry. Setting the column to use a specific type ("Text"), keeps it from trying to use heuristics to figure out that something is a date.

Something more recent is the introduction into Excel of Power Query, which lets you import a CSV and apply arbitrary transformations (such as applying a type), before it hits the workbook, so if you need to pull in a CSV, you can do so, and it will always be imported the same way.