They aren't just competing against Excel but an Office 365 license. Not saying it's impossible but it kinda is impossible when you don't offer the entire product portfolio at a competitive price.
I see the same problem w/ Adobe's Creative Suite, for instance I use some of the applications in it a lot, some I don't use at all but think I might use, some I have problems with but persevere with anyway (I built a monster "gaming PC" and now I can stand using Lightroom again.) I'm not so inclined to get one of the pro photo competitors of Lightroom because I won't save money on my CC license... Believe it or not "Generative Fill" is deepening my attachment to Photoshop not because I have it draw things from a prompt but without a prompt it can add an extra row of bricks to a photo to make it centered properly, eliminate an ugly sploch that I can't unsee, make power lines go away and do it all right the first time.
In my old slide decks I draw plenty of connections between spreadsheets, "no code", "low code", intelligent data prep, business rules engine, process automation, etc. For one thing it is a tough problem because people use spreadsheets for many different things: sometimes you really want a pandas dataframe, sometimes you want an object-based modelling tool with simulation capabilities. As the article points out it is common for startups to focus on one of these angles and evade the direct competition with Excel (and the atrocious Google Sheets) but when you do that you miss the holistic perspective that somehow spreadsheets work as a system and they are the original "low code" tool that helps the non-professional programmer put their skills on wheels.