It's a trap because once you get comfortable in Excel you have a lot of resistance to try anything more productive than Excel. Seen that numerous times with people who work really fast with Excel yet end up very limited as to what they can actually deal with beyond simple problems.
Basically it grew out of the fact that many of these companies are focused on Windows, given the software of the data readers and laboratory robots.
So it is quite common to have Visual Studio licenses around.
A common pattern for the history of many VB packages I found out across the business units, was software that started in Excel, alongside VBA macros, and eventually was ported into VB.