But in the notebooks you run pyspark / scala spark / spark sql code?

Yes, you can, if you want.

Yes, but for most of these companies they don't actually run (much or any) spark stuff, they just use the notebooks.

It's really depressing, tbh but I've made my peace with it now.

I can’t blame them really. Regular pandas-in-notebook can deal with quite a bit of data and is reasonably convenient. Even if the org and datasets are large, it’s rare to have huge single tables. Then you can go full spark when you have to.

Sure, but why bother paying databricks for that? By default you'll be running 3+ machines while doing all your work in memory on the master node. It's just so very, very silly.

True. I’ve been wondering why they don’t facilitate non-spark use better. But then you can’t reasonably invoice 3 VMs extra, obviously.