I'd venture out and guess that Excel is probably the most widely used programming environment in the world. Excel macros are a type of programming language, and there are many businesses that rely on complex Excel spreadsheets as part of their operations.

The fact that these are called macros and not a programming language might be a reason why they are so heavily adopted: to avoid scaring people away from using Excel. This reminds me of an observation from Richard Stallman's speech about Emacs (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html), where secretaries used Emacs Lisp to extend the editor.

In a personal computing world that has a sharp distinction between "user" and "programmer," Excel is one of those exceptions where the distinction between "user" and "programmer" is blurred, since you need to use macros to take advantage of Excel's power. Excel macros are the gateway to learning Visual Basic for Applications, a full-fledged embedded programming language. Then once you know VBA, then the road to learning other programming languages such as JavaScript and Python becomes easier.

The analysts I knew at my last job would use Excel to prototype huge, incredibly complex business logic and calculations, and then have programmers (or the skilled ones would do it themselves) implement this stuff in SQL or whatever language made the most sense when it came to analysing billions of rows of real data.

It's an exceptionally powerful tool for prototyping.

Not only is Excel a real-time programming IDE, similar to today's "notebooks", one could also consider it "functional".

It's those pushing programming who need to answer why it's so much better, since the Excel approach does seem to work for large numbers of people.

because sometimes I need to deploy things that will fail gracefully with people who don't know how to code. I can setup some complex things in excel that if some one does somethign unexpected or data does something unexpected, they can just overwrite things.

Code is great but requires systems that are not always in place.

I would argue a formula one race car is better than a 10 year old honda. But the honda doesn't need a support crew to get me to work, can be started in an instant, and doesn't care if I forget to change the oil for a year.

context matters in choosing technical solutions. Your argument is no different than all those other ones over what programming language is 'best'

Excel IS a programming language.

it allows more agile delivery :P