[Closi]

I think two stated downsides have been somewhat addressed in excel in recent years:

The “high code duplication” downside has definitely been addressed in recent versions of excel, first with dynamic array formulas (which let you apply one formula to a number of cells, which can resize according to the data with use of unique/filter) and then with new expressions such as Let / Lambda.

Secondly Vlookup has been replaced with the faster, simpler and easier to read Xlookup. Using this with named ranges and dynamic arrays, if you wanted to get a students exam result from a table for example, you could have a formula that looks something like =XLookup(A2, Results_Name, Results_Score)

[egeria_planning]

I don't think you can address the downsides without completely redesigning Excel. There were some attempts to add loops, IFs and so on to the assembly language. Somehow this approach could not compete with Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Support_for_...