This. Access is a very powerful package to quickly slap down a structured data model with data entry forms and report generators. The benefit is that it automatically guarantees consistency in data entry and processing. Spreadsheets are notoriously bad at enforcing structure.
Yeah - people basically had entire applications written in Access - think very simple point-of-sale systems, record keeping tools etc. The downside of course, is that, it ran on a single computer and there wasn't a concept of multi-user systems (or maybe there was and I just wasn't aware of it).
In some ways, it's a hark back to the day of a really 'thick' client that was a server, middleware and client all in one.
Access scales from being a one process all-in-one solution to multiple processes sharing the same database file and also to a separate ODBC-connected database engine with Access as a frontend. At least some 20 years ago, there was an assistant to automatically migrate an Access database to a split Access/SQL Server setup.
If I had to throw together a reasonably robust data entry form in a time crunch today and could connect to the DB engine via ODBC, I'd probably still use Access for that.
If you've never used a tool like Access, it's hard to explain just how powerful it really is for ordinary people.