Yes, it could be useful, if seen as a natural language front-end to a symbolic math package.

That's been done - Wolfram Alpha.

The fact that it's been done is no reason not to do it again. Even if two implementations were somehow a bad thing, Wolfram Alpha is the closedest of closed source, and replacing it with something auditable is a win for science.

Sure, but nobody in academia is going to get anywhere describing their work as writing a replacement for Excel, right?

I'm certain that, if someone came up with a workable replacement for Excel, then it would have a market in academia. (Would it earn the creator promotions? I think clickbait-y titles are more likely, not less, to get promotions.) I base this largely on the success of TeX in the hard sciences, which, by and large, won't touch Word unless absolutely forced to do so. (At least, that's how it is in math.) This is rather ahistorical, since TeX actually predates Word, but I still believe it.

> So basically they created some sort of general purpose math library, that can automatically detect the type of problem

they likely trained language model on bunch of stack overflow questions or something similar.