I‘ve been using MS Access some twenty years ago to do all sorts of magic for small businesses. That was from the 90s to the early 2000s. - Later I‘d use Python to do magic for companies who didn‘t know anything better than MS Excel to handle large sets of data, and when they were lost in chaos, I‘d start to streamline, process, tidy their data and help them make sense.

Just two examples that showed me: Use whatever helps you to get the job done, automate and streamline processes, select tools that might give you a competitive advantage.

Edit: I love Emacs, for everything text and code and some more, but there are way better tools for the task the author describes.