If your data is <10k rows, Excel is great. After that lots of stuff stops working. Stick to R or Python data science libraries for real work.
They somehow cooked up a spreadsheet that make them hit the limits much earlier.
Excel has grown hugely since then.
You can’t exceed these limits without being heavily alerted/warned by the application too.
Every spreadsheet application and database has these sort of limits anyway, eg:
* Google Sheets limits total cells, although can only handle a tiny fraction of what excel can.
* Postgres limits columns to 1600 (much less than excel)
* Mongo limits document size