Tables are something I want to tackle and I'd like to do them right because (as you point out) are crucial. I didn't get there yet...

I want to make it such that you can code on the left and then hide everything and share that with non technical folks. That's why I did not use a Colab, creating something interactive with it (and I did that quite a lot in the past) it's a bit of a PITA.

I highly suggest that you look at both Org mode table formats, one of them almost certainly has much of the UI and features you are targeting.

As a well seasoned web developer, when I'm doing front-end, there are always 2 big problems: Data tables and loading indicators (fun way of saying it's hard to tackle lazy loading without a request waterfall).

The second problem has had good attempts in the recent years, but no single web application can beat excel in terms of data tables (while not 100% relevant anymore, I really like the super light introduction here from Joel Spolsky: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxBg4sMusIg )

to your first point i think its a good idea to offer both if possible. Like hide the code behind an interface wysiwig-style but give users the option to also edit the code directly if they want to

These are basically block editors. The problem is more, regular users just arnt going to be doing it period.

It's basically a pyramid problem:

1 programmer will program all the things

2 power users will create all the forms from pieces of the programmers documents

999+ will use the output and never care about any of the rest

There's just minimal middle ground, and the only answer is to cater to all three but in Different ways

The large tables issue might be solvable with Emacs. Org mode had two table formats, one of which is a veritable spreadsheet. It's all text under the hood, but Emacs (at least with Evil) provides a easy interface to create and populate rows, columns, and cells.

fwiw:I don't think WYSIWYG is that useful here. It'll by its nature appeal to a crowd that's more technical than the average user. (You won't replace Excel day 1)

There's also the fact that if this is supposed to become more than a design exploration, it might be useful to focus on what this can do that spreadsheets can't - a WYSIWYG editor for spreadsheets is just a spreadsheet.

And I definitely think there's something good here, and that is not a spreadsheet or a colab notebook. It's worth digging into what that might be.