If the earliest sports were a way to practice skills needed for hunting or warfare, then making an e-sport out of spreadsheets is going back to the roots of sports. It's practicing skills needed for your daily job.
In many cases you’re right. I manage some spreadsheets at work that are relatively small, have little/no automation, and are really just inventory lists with some notes on each item. Could be a CSV.
The other day I couldn't get my VLOOKUP function to work because the table I was trying to query hadn't been designated "Table2" but "Table14" because....? Company laptop was dangerously close to putting a small dent in the closest brick wall. Doing this for fun? What?
I think at certain point you're kind of expected to switch to INDEX & MATCH. I did plenty of Excel macros for work back in the day and at similar point I just switched to doing things in Python.
I just cannot imagine any task you can do in excel that isn't easier to do with Python/Pandas. The simplest manipulations of an excel sheet pretty much require you to chain an ungodly list of arcane commands that are completely unreadable, and god forbid you need to work with data from several workbooks at the same time...
I started but then I noticed the scrollbar and realised it's a lot longer read than I have the attention for right now - to the "read later (yeah right)" pile with you!