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That’s certainly history, if you use a modern file format such as .xlsx, and, likely, also if you use the old format.

Microsoft likely changed several in memory structures when Excel went 64-bit, if not earlier.

One thing that Execl does is multi-threaded recalculation (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/office/client-developer/exc...)

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> Microsoft Office Excel 2007 was the first version of Excel to use multithreaded recalculation (MTR) of worksheets. You can configure Excel to use up to 1024 concurrent threads when recalculating, regardless of the number of processors or processor cores on the computer.

Somewhere, there is probably someone running hundreds of threads for excel (likely in a beefy VM/VDI). It is probably wired so deep into their business that they are afraid to move to other methods (that are more scalable). But such is the power of excel. What you see is what you get is not to be underestimated.

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