Yes, and? It should be a simple checklist item for any scientific journal to ask the author whether they used excel or not. If they say yes, reject the paper unless they can show their work hasn't been affected negatively by using excel.
Intellectually, it feels snobbish to single out Excel like this. I'm a software engineer in science, and I generally agree that scientists should learn some kind of coding. But you can make mistakes in Python or R as well - not to mention in physical experiments. We should check data and methods in general, not presume incompetence if people use one tool.
It's not coincidental that big evil FDA/pharma requires people to sign - on paper - their lab notes (and to have lab notes, and to sign that they calibrated the equipment, and that they checked for common mistakes).
And yes, I know this costs a lot, and that this is sort of a pipe dream. And I'm not saying this is the best solution. Renaming genes might be a lot better, because it just allows the field to move on, and Excel will eventually die out, or at least researchers will move away from it - maybe to Jupyter, if we're lucky.
So, all in all, of course Excel is just a symptom, but society is already pretty stubborn when it comes to financing R&D and progress.
Ideally excel would change, but since we know it won't, and we want to work with lots of people with minimal problems, we must adapt.
Researchers should use other, more appropriate tools, or at the very least specify the column type when importing data into Excel. It's not that hard.
It's one thing to change typed in user text in real time. That's not causing any problems. It's another to randomly mutate cells amongst tens of thousands of rows. I don't think that has ever helped anyone.
If I can get a trained immunologist looking at my data, I'd much rather have 5 more minutes of their analytical skills than teaching them about common data exchange pitfalls.