FWIW, one of the biggest fast food franchise chains in my country uses a custom Excel sheet as their main backoffice app across the organization. From what I can tell, it's far from a single user app with a small dataset.
Yes, it can be done with a lot of care, but perhaps needing more care than a "real" CRUD application would need. Data normalization, ACID (transaction integrity), indexes, server-side validation, roles (user access levels), etc. take more effort to put into a spreadsheet (or add work-arounds for) than a regular CRUD stack (such as LAMP).
They are great for small projects and prototyping, but just don't scale well unless you want to pay for expensive babysitting.
Note a good CRUD app allows exporting of data to Excel for searching or experimenting with budget scenarios etc., but the "original" data should be in a real database.
The eternal struggle to find balance between spending all your time type checking, compiling, linting, Rusting, testing, unit testing, CIing, etc and actually making working code.
Data normalization, ACID (transaction integrity), indexes, server-side validation, roles (user access levels), etc. take more effort to put into a spreadsheet (or add work-arounds for) than a regular CRUD stack (such as LAMP).
All those things take less effort if you already know how to use Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP or Python. If you don’t, but do know how to use a spreadsheet, it takes vastly less effort to do those in a spreadsheet than to learn how to do those with a LAMP stack.
And there are orders of magnitude more people in the latter group than in the former, and their time generally costs much less on the open market.
Which, to be clear, I don’t think is a good thing! Doing those things with a spreadsheet is worse in every way—effectiveness, maintainability, you name it—except this one way. But it’s usually the only one that matters.
My dream, coming soon to an Internet near you, is to “democratize” the things that come easy to us “real programmers”.
They are great for small projects and prototyping, but just don't scale well unless you want to pay for expensive babysitting.
Note a good CRUD app allows exporting of data to Excel for searching or experimenting with budget scenarios etc., but the "original" data should be in a real database.