I was complaining just today because I pasted some records into Excel and it decided to treat 933349234275230104 as a number (it's a hash), convert it to scientific notation (which I NEVER want), and lose precision. Yet there is no way to globally disable scientific notation. Plus it's kind of insane that "formatting" changes data in the first place.
I frequently paste timestamps into Sheets or Excel and it just ruins everything. If split-to-text puts the date part in one column and the time part in another, I can't put them back together with a simple string concatenation, because again "formatting" turned my date text into Excel's weird internal number. This is legacy behavior that Excel has to keep for backward compatibility, but I don't want it, and I wish I could turn it off.
Sometimes I'll try to scatter-plot 5 series against a timestamp, and Excel will decide all 6 columns are series, even though a scatter plot with no X-axis makes zero sense. Even when it does work, Excel seems stubbornly uninterested in understanding how dates/times work, and I can't do simple things like tell it to have an X-axis tick every day/week/month.
If you are building a spreadsheet in 2023, the #1 goal should be leaving behind all the baggage, even if it has to be behind a toggle. Listen to what people find frustrating about Excel (tip: it's gonna be dates) and fix that.
If you can do that, then yeah, Python! Woo! Neat! But that's not going to be the main draw, because it's not a solution to the main problems that spreadsheets have.