These people were trained in excel I assume, it's cultural and then you also have this weird pivot point like C where excel has reactive semantics, data table, ad-hoc input / modeling .. it's a massive reactive data notebook on steroid that requires next to no fiddling to get working.

Now as you point, things are changing.. R/julia/numpy/notebooks, reactive web frameworks.. can all suck some use case from excel. I believe that future clearly lies in the middle. Microsoft should be wise to implement some presentation/component feature to match the web.