I also recall my pushback was along the lines of "who on earth would want that". Yeah, it's a good thing I'm not the person coming up with these things :)
Where are you getting that from? To start with the pipe operator has been independently reinvented multiple times in R, and neither ‘magrittr’ nor ‘dplyr’ were the first to introduce the pipe operator into R. And (at least when I was exposed to it), the pipe operator had nothing whatsoever to do with Excel. Instead, it was an attempt to introduce the composability concepts from the UNIX shell and Haskell composition into R.
EDIT: I found the conversation in question but it involved deleted tweets. And those deleted tweets are the one that reference the package name. Sigh. It was just after the release of magrittr and several months after dplyr
I have no idea where you get that impression, most Excel power users I have met take a long time to understand how to use the pipe operator in R.
In the intervening time I've become a large advocate for the pattern of chained operators. So I'd imagine I'd enjoy piping in R. And if that means I'm emulating a common Excel workflow, that's fine. I won't have the childish response of "ew, Excel" :)