Putting a very powerful (if archaic) tool in the hands of people without the experience or understanding to use it effectively and then passing around the results for editing by other people with similarly (or differently) deficient ability with the program is the problem.
The tool is simply too flexible to be used for many of the things it's doing by many of the people who are using it. This is one of the good reasons that we (application developers) do our best to gather requirements: Excel is usually good at what it does, but it does so many things that understanding what it does that you don't need it to do, or how and why it does things you've accidentally done or need to watch out for, has become as -- if not more -- important as/than understanding what it was you wanted to do in the first place.
So yes... Excel plays a role in some very bad things. But no, it's not Excel's fault.