Yea exactly my take. This seems like exactly what Excel is good at doing.
Excel has many issues, but the cost of replacing it is surprisingly high.
I'm going through this right now. Not anywhere in this scale, but just in terms of deciding whether to move an order-tracking/accounting system I've built in Excel to a "real" database.
The database I am considering (Panorama X for Mac) is quite inexpensive, I've heard very good things about it, and has a spreadsheet-like UI. However, I've used Excel enough to know that I haven't tapped more than a small fraction of its ability, especially things like Power Query. As much as I loathe VBA, what if the cost of moving to a "real" database isn't the up-front cost, but the longer-term inflexibility of Panorama (and, pretty much, anything else in my price range) compared to the beast that is Excel?
Nail guns have a lot of downsides vs using screws, but being much faster and cheap offsets quite a lot.
Just the massive, massive ecosystem of online tutorials and answers and YouTube videos for every conceivable question [1] is incomparable.
[1] Except the one you want the answer to at a given moment, amirite fellas?
Everytime I relearn how to do a vlookup, none of the examples online do what I want. It's like they are trying to do something completely opposite of what I want. It's super weird, because what I want to do is always a pretty common thing to need done.
I'm not sure how that'd help in any of the cases where I use vlookup.