I’m quite sad there isn’t anything like access these days. I feel like I see fairly clever solutions for things being built in excel, but they can’t scale very well to multiple users. For a lot of processes something like Access would be great for bridging the gap.

My oversimplified observation is that, Adobe products at the high-end notwithstanding, MS Office basically crystallized what was a mainstream office productivity suite now that companies weren't buying one-off products. Rather than buying a low-end/midrange desktop publishing program, they made it work with Word. Rather than using a low-end database (of which there were many), the made do with Excel.