That’s a really good comparison. Excel is often used for storing data and doing analysis because it just plain works. And anyone can use it.

Notebooks tend to be the same way. It’s a simple GUI-ish was to do many complex analyses in a quick and dirty way.

And many of the arguments for not using Excel are the same as not using notebooks. Each is good at the initial data exploration stage, but are often abused and used in production when everyone knows it is a bad idea. But it still “works” so it is unlikely to be replaced.

(Especially when those that are working with the data don’t always have the skill set to build out a full production workflow.)