Not really. With care, you can usually get the format right temporarily, but it often changes for non-obvious reasons and there's no way to see that the format is wrong until it mangles your data.
In general, one of the worst things about Excel is there's no obvious way to lock anything to keep it from getting changed by accident.
Preferences have become a pretty natural part of using a computer, I'm not sure why we can't rely on users trying that when they run into problems.
I would be worried about endless forking of defaults as a feature of newly built tools, leading to a bunch of new tools that will be harder to maintain.
If they can't manage implicit data casting preferences (if those exist, they may not), surely handing them something more complicated like R, MATLAB, or SQL is even worse.
Interesting little article. I just read about Jeff Bezos initiative to push for all departments at Amazon to be accessible as service interfaces. Could there be real interdisciplinary growth by having academic fields concepts and data accessible in the same way? Maybe starting with papers. But then if every model developed was some kind of living running service in the cloud or hosted on .edu you could query or interact with
In general, one of the worst things about Excel is there's no obvious way to lock anything to keep it from getting changed by accident.