Huge numbers of accountants and lawyers use excel heavily knowing only the built in formula language. They will have a few "gurus" sprinkled around who can write macros but this is used sparingly because the macros are a black box and make it harder to audit the financial models.

I've worked in finance for 20 years and this is the complete opposite of my experience. Excel is ubiquitous and drives all sorts of business processes in various departments. I've seen people I would consider Excel gurus, in that they are able to use Excel much more productively than normal users, but I've almost never seen anyone use VBA.