Many of the issues mentioned are about poorly skilled people doing poorly skilled things that can happen in any environment

("None of them—not a single one in over a decade—used cell names to help make the formulas easier to understand." have you never seen variables named a, b, c? Same thing with nesting- just like you can add newlines and spaces in the formula bar, you can cram everything in a single line in your programming language unless it enforces whitespace)

But that doesn't translate to "you", you can follow the rules to make the formulas readable, you don't need to follow the bad guys?

Though in general yeah, the tooling you have to do anything complicated in a well architectured way in Excel is just awful