So ... Excel instead of AirTable?

Excel is not the "best" tool for most of what it is made to do

But it is the available tool for the majority of people out there - it is plenty good enough to get most of what most people want to get done with it done ... so they use it

I remember in the late 90s using Excel (5.0, at the time) for a variety of statistical operations

...all of which I was informed by the in-house SPSS expert were "not possible to do" in Excel

Is importing your data into Tableau, or a database and using PowerBI, or into a time-series analysis tool like Splunk or ELK "better"? In the strict sense of the word ... probably

But the point remains: Excel is good enough to get it done