Often that work exists regardless of if a table of processed data that engineering formatted and schema-fied is dumped out to Excel or queried over SQL into Pandas...

I've seen this myself: the person who "naively" downloads that table and plays around in excel finds interesting things that the person who was using Pandas hadn't, because the code to manipulate columns and do certain types of calcs is actually more time consuming to write and modify than making a bunch of new columns in Excel with a bunch of formulas!

A good data scientist will have a more rigorous approach to their notebooks and practice reuse and so on... but that's not necesssarily easy.