Yeah no, if people who were decided by this paper took it at face value without checking the numbers made sense, it's not an excel ui's fault. As for the others, they would have picked that policy choice with or without that paper.
Sure, we could argue over multiple possible sources of blame and maybe we will conclude that Excel is not the most important. It seems nearly impossible to have that debate in a rigorous way. In any case, "the evidence will be ignored anyway" is not a good argument to use a tool that will produce bad evidence.