How? I did volunteer work for a charity and if a collaborative doc was important, on every mobile device we had "keep offline" so even in an area without internet coverage (in a warehouse or got a call while out in the wilderness or something) we had our data.
We had budgets, inventories, checklists, all that kind of stuff.
I guess its a design issue if a tool makes it possible to self sabotage, however much effort it requires, but its not much of a practical issue.
There are parts of it that do suck like other people assuming we had fully featured excel and they do really weird things with the strangest darkest never before seen corners of excel, but overall on average it simply wasn't an issue.
That's not to excuse their lack of support, but just to point out that alternatives might not be better. I'd rather have one problem in ten years that doesn't get resolved due to lousy support than ten problems, eight of which get resolved with stellar support.
Even if you host yourself, you probably grossly underestimate the likelihood of failure. The wrong set of disks failing at the same time, a fat-finger by an admin, etc. are going to be way more common and can potentially destroy much more data. Not to mention the costs are certainly higher, when you consider hardware and administration.