> But this also tends to make us forget sometimes that those things aren't always a big deal. It's the distinction between solving an immediate problem vs. building a proper solution.

I agree about the "code quality" not being a huge issue for some use cases, however having worked at places with entrenched spreadsheet workflows (like currently), I think that non engineers still need help seeing they don't need a faster horse - e.g. automate this task away. Many, many times a "spreadsheet" is ironically used for a very inefficient manual task.

> Many, many times a "spreadsheet" is ironically used for a very inefficient manual task.

Right. But spreadsheets and "shadow IT" aren't really about technology - they're about autonomy, about how the organization is structured internally. No one is choosing a bad process from the start - spreadsheets are the easiest (and often the only possible) way to solve an immediate problem, and even as they turn into IT horror stories, there usually is no point at which the people using it could make things better on their own. The "quality solutions", conversely, are usually top-down and don't give users much control over the process - instead of adoption, this just breeds resistance.