I feel like GNUCash splits the difference. You still get a GUI and reporting tools, but you also get the benefit of local reasoning that double entry accounting provides: as long as every transaction is balanced the entire book is balanced. And the data model supports transactions between more than two accounts, which is extremely useful.

My preferred backend is SQL based, so it's a relatively amenable to inspection and custom tooling.

In fact, let’s just use Excel for everything.

Throw away all other software, you don’t need any of that.

For my own personal stuff I do just use spreadsheets. Copy paste and some super hacky SQL queries, done. Double entry bookkeeping is total overkill for most people's home budgeting.

I do use ledger if it's for other people's money though, cus the liability of getting things wrong is higher.

This, but with SQL instead of Excel.