Anyone who hasn't used Excel is totally out of touch with reality (constrained to developed world). Excel is counterintuitive to whom? What intuition does it upset? It's a grid of cells. Each cell can reference any other. You can immediately see the definition of any cell when selecting it. I'd wager that it's used as a presentation or modeling tool far more than as a CSV editor. Its dynamic aggregated views, what-if scenarios, charting and dashboarding hardly could be replicated with SQLite or CSV tools alone. Surely not as seamlessly or intuitively as Excel.

Agreed, it has permeated every single industry in the developed world. Professional software developers have been known to reach for it, in a pinch, over dozens of other known and much more powerful tools.

The immediate feedback and visual layout make it the definition of "killer app." Jupiter notebooks has been trying to replicate the magic for years. Entire businesses and industries are built around selling products to successfully replicate what was originally living in a spreadsheet somewhere.