I remember those times well, particularly all the clones - i.e. Foxpro. Dbase was a great idea but I sure hated the language used. Paradox and Access were clearly superior.
Losing Access and similar things has lead to Salesforce being a billion dollar company; when it's basically AccessOnline™.
They had one IT guy that managed everything and I remember him saying it was either going to be Apple or some Linux distro and by using Apple for all their stuff, it greatly reduced the amount spent on tons of other IT stuff that he would have to deal with if it were Windows based.
How? Aren't Google & Excel Spreadsheets end user databases?
If you've never used a tool like Access, it's hard to explain just how powerful it really is for ordinary people.
In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.
Looks like there are some additional configurations that MS actively supports: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/ways-to-share-an-...
If I had to throw together a reasonably robust data entry form in a time crunch today and could connect to the DB engine via ODBC, I'd probably still use Access for that.
It seems we have decided to go the SaaS route instead and you get online only things that sort of play at Access, but "with cloud".