It’s an awful mix of half-assed approaches to things. Awkward syntax on everything and very poor at recognizing what types of data it is handling.
Open a CSV in a fresh Excel install. It will almost certainly mistake something for a date if the CSV is sufficiently large (unless the user is exceedingly explicit at changing settings for that particular CSV). It will reformat that data as a date, and as an added bonus, since Autosave is on by default, it’ll save that reformatted data back into your CSV. Yes, settings can be changed to avoid these things. But why isn’t it just designed better so as to avoid it altogether?
If that was just a natural side effect of spreadsheet apps, I could understand it. But LibreOffice Calc is a million times better at recognizing what types of data it is handling, so it seems to just be Excel’s shittiness.
The fact that it also hasn’t really changed beyond aesthetics since 2004 is just… wild.
The corporate world absolutely idolizes the grift. Being able to “produce value” (=make more money while actually not producing anything more) is the only game left. Shareholders look at something like EA that releases the same old Madden year after year while making money hand over fist, and they fucking salivate.