Having a visual way to configure this makes it much more accessible to non-programmers, with error checking available through the host (Excel, in this case), while also reducing the eng effort in building this.

At Google, many internal tools use Sheets as their source of truth for config data, and it works really well.

> Having a visual way to configure this makes it much more accessible to non-programmers

I agree completely but thats not the point he appears to be making making. He never stated this was the use case and he reiterated that it was a bad idea which should never be done.

Regardless, I’m saying those arent really unique advantages to excel. They just look unique compared to json, toml, yaml, etc.

I can't think of any data entry method more easily understood by non-programmers than an Excel spreadsheet (or Google Sheets etc). Repetitive data in particular is a breeze since you can drag-expand and use formulas. We use GSheets at work for configs created by non-programmers, and it works great.

What is your point? You can see from my previous comment I already agree excel is user friendly for non programmers.

The user-friendliness is a unique advantage of Excel.

You're missing the point. Power came not from Excel the file format, but Excel the GUI tool for editing Excel files. You cannot have drop-downs and colour pickers and separate tabs and embedded images in a single python file without writing a a whole custom GUI config tool.

Python can and often is edited by GUI tools with color pickers and dropdowns. IDEs such as Vscode have these.

I think the difference there though is that an Excel file is a lot more approachable to non-technical folks (even superficially). Depends on what's being configured and by whom though.