Yes, but without inventing a time machine to go back to 1985 or so (at which time the safe option did not exist, so better invent temporal code backporting as well), that's not a viable option.

Any change to Excel's 'open a worksheet' logic would break so many workflows it's just not funny anymore. I'm not kidding if I say I suspect it would significantly impact several countries' GDP for a while.

Even the (sometimes comically inadequate) heuristics that Excel uses to auto-determine field types can't be updated, for very similar reasons. Backwards-compatibility is... interesting...