I'm one of those. Excel's ease of use isn't relevant if you already know how to use Python / Jupyter / DuckDB / whatever.

The mental model of describing a series of reproducible transformations on normalized tables is more intuitive to me.

Excel lets you do too many things. As a result, I mostly see spreadsheets that aren't much more machine-parsanle than a word document.

We had to write a score-table at a party lately, and a while ago, and I managed to get it working with DataSpell faster, than it took us to figure out how Google Sheets stupid date-parsing works.