Of course, all the aforementioned issues with excel can be avoided or changed in settings.
Has the pendulum really swung so far to the other side that sheets is the consistently better option? What about keyboard shortcuts and power users?
- Heavy text munging. The builtin regex functions have no equivalent in Excel without dropping down into custom
- Quick and dirty data pulls and third party integrations. Especially any that involve Google services (since the auth process is less painful). I used to use both VBA and App Script pretty extensively, and could switch between the two without much issue. But I use neither as frequently as I used to, and it's significantly easier to ramp back up and ship when I use App Script rather than VBA. Excel supports Javascript now, but are only usable if you can ensure it's going to be used exclusively in newer versions of Excel.
- Sheets I create for others (especially shared by multiple users) that I know I'll need to maintain and support later on. The access controls, change auditing & revert capabilities, and standardized/centralized execution environment all remove entire classes of support needs and the associated cognitive overhead when triaging issues.
That said, there are certain times I prefer to use Excel.
- Pivot charts are amazing and have no equivalent in Sheets.
- Pivot tables are far more powerful than their Sheets counterpart.
- PowerBI is fantastic (except for the lack of Excel for Mac support. Which can still view the results of PowerBI, but can't do any editing).
- When connecting to internal data sources. Getting access to data sources, for business teams, is a royal pain in the ass. Legitimately so, since it's rare for a business team to have a resource with a technical enough skillset to truly be trusted with direct access to anything. Getting access that's reachable outside of the intranet (where App Script would run) is virtually impossible.
And in response to your comment, Excel is still the de-facto tool for people in analyst and non-technical positions.