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Among other things, spreadsheets allow you to see and fix one-off errors caused by bad data. A "real" programming language is great when you have clean data, but the real world is messy and businesses generally don't devote enough effort to cleaning data. So the person doing the analysis usually has to both scrub the data and do the calculations.

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I mean, you have to look at, validate, and clean your data no matter how you chose to analyze it. Any tool, whether it uses a "real" programming language or not, is going to need to support that to be useful at all, and unless your data is "fits in one or two screens of a spreadsheet" scale, I don't see how they would be better in this regard.

Spreadsheets are useful for data exploration. Can you do data exploration with other tools? Sure you can, but spreadsheets make exploring data intuitive and there's value to be had from that. I'd suggest it's not a good idea to get too hung up on any one tool, most of the time people just want to use the one that gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. Sometimes that'll be a script, sometimes not. Sometimes that'll be a spreadsheet, sometimes not.

Suggesting spreadsheets are useful for messy data is scary. Spreadsheets are associated with a bunch of errors.

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