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As opposed to placing the mission critical operations in some huge enterprise Java deployment which has been touched by thousands of contractors, all of whom have only a very rudimentary understanding of the actual business logic.

I think even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders is preferred.

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The main problem is that a complex spreadsheet is just code. Its a bundle of logic and data. That's code.

If the business stakeholders can edit said spreadsheet, they can code. Not well probably, but they can.

So, theoretically, they should be able to open a python script or whatever and hack away. A lot of calculations are actually much easier and straightforward in a real language as opposed to Excel.

But they won't, partially because developers would never let them.

> even a complicated spreadsheet that can be directly edited and modified by the actual business stakeholders

You can do that in a spreadsheet-database hybrid such as Airtable.

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