And if you want a string in Excel you must apostrophe-prefix it. If you think “serial number” == number, telephone number == number, then try to use the number handling, you get problems because “numbers” don’t have leading zeros or spaces or parens or hashes or plus symbols.

I would like to store, then retrieve exactly 1234567890123456789 apples instead of 1.070816993713379 × 2⁶⁰ = 1234567939550609408. Unfortunately due to IEEE-754 conversions I can only do this up to 7-8 digits or so. This is a number, just not one that can be represented as a Number without loss of precision towards the end.

that's more apples than we can fit on the planet. For such special tasks I would think it's ok to need special tools