Yes you do. If you want to have buttons and tables and do something above of only showing the data you'll need to learn VBA. Also SQL implementation for MSAccess has some peculiar stuff in regards to LIKE or how datetime is handled. So you'll learn 2 programming languages actually - VBA % the variaton of SQL that MSAccess has. And you can't scale up from single user to multiple users as MSAccess is not a server like PostgreSQL.
And Access is multi-user. You don't want a lot of users on it, but you can have more than one. This is extra credit though, the OP never asked for a multi-user solution.
FileMaker Pro (https://www.claris.com/filemaker/pro/) probably still is an option. It isn’t free in any sense, though.
dBase also still exists (http://www.dbase.com/ (web page looks like a print of an ugly presentation)), but I wouldn’t know whether that ticks all the boxes.