"A spreadsheet is then the simplest, most organically natural way of organizing discrete units of information, the easiest way to perform CRUD operations on any type of data."

So... you've basically answered the question here.

"It’s been 40 years since the original Visicalc spreadsheet program was released, and no one has been able to beat them"

There is a reason that columnar workbooks and spreadsheets have been around since humans started writing down numbers and manipulating them... it works.

A "grid of cells" does exactly what it is supposed to do in the most efficient manner possible. The only "innovation" opportunities are making the underlying product suck less, or providing analytics/reporting functionality.