[kazinator]

You can't accuse Alfred Aho (the 'A' in 'awk') of not being a computer scientist. Yet in awk, nonexistent varaibles serve as zero or empty strings, and strings that look like numbers can be used for arithmetic. This is a matter of pragmatism which depends on the goal of the tool and the target users.

No doubt, it poorly serves users who want to create huge, complicated spreadsheets, or large programs.

Spreadsheets could address the problem by having this as a cell property. Suppose you could highlight a rectangular region of the spreadsheet and mark the whole region as having "strict initialization": any cells in the region which are empty will trigger a diagnostic if they are accessed.