I think the concern is less that it's a good tool, and more that it's one invariably receives emails with attached documents that open well only in Excel.
Regardless, even if the recipient has Excel, I think it is poor form to insert an Excel object into your reports and emails. The copy/paste menu allows you to paste charts and graphs as images, and it's a superior option to inserting an actual graph (or table) the majority of the time. Not only does it preserve the formatting, and allow better cross-platform compatibility, but documents with images instead of graphs open faster and are generally smaller.
Putting people down for using Excel for simple tasks is snobbery, plain and simple. I'm not a Microsoft apologist in the least (I use Linux as my desktop OS), and I can confidently say Excel is a great program. While there are more powerful tools, Excel is often perfectly suited for smaller tasks. When I need to clean and match a small set of data, I'll reach for Excel. When I need to clean and link a small set of data, I'd rather use filter and VLOOKUP in Excel than dealing with SQL/R/Python.
The faster I can turn data into information the happier my coworkers are, and the happier I am in turn.