Ugh. Yeah, this is more common than one would hope. I met someone with a Masters in CS who worked at a public database company whose primary role was to keep the spreadsheet up-to-date with Jira data. What a waste of talent!
They would have automated their job and probably working on something else. I've used JIRA's API to spit out reports when people have demanded they fit in their "Agile enterprise project management" Excel templates.
It was a two-directional affair for them. Not just about reporting to a spreadsheet, but also about be able to shift things around during a meeting and then "sync" back at the end of the meeting. So a lot of stuff that's hard to automate, sadly.