A spreadsheet is a database you haven't yet performed a migration on yet. I think the argument is less around better spreadsheets and more around migrating that data into real datastores once constraints are encountered (whether that's a desire to support large amounts of contributors, not run on Google, the dataset has grown too large, etc).

It's hard to go from Google Sheets to a web frontend to Postgresql and a snappy shared frontend. That is the problem statement to solve for imho (interface, schema, data portability).