Clearly I've been overengineering by using code to remotely control industry hardware in real-time. I should've been using a spreadsheet all along!

The article says that code is designed for computers to read, not humans, when in fact code is designed for both.

Spreadsheets and code have their respective applications.

One of my early gigs was in a, for my country and the standards at the time (90s), large factory; they ran almost everything on Excel and Access. From the erp, hrm, crm, entry gates, phone system, truck loading bays, industrial systems if they could be accessed via Windows, cafetarias PoSs etc. VBA plugged into everything with the sysadmin doing 'version management' of 1000s of evolving data mixed with code files on networking (Novell I think when I was there) shares. They kept that up for quite a while until the sysadmin got ill; I was there to fix some issues in Access because he could not do it fulltime now. They replaced everything for far more expensive and inflexible erp and control software; it did no longer depend on one person working 247 though.