Just look into a some nearly arbitrary industry/department where Excel is used extensively. Replacing some "cobbled together" Excel workbooks with properly implemented applications very often yields a lot of low-hanging fruits where you can "add value with code".
How would you get people to trust you to do this and make a solution that they can maintain in the long term? It's hard for me to envision an organization accepting this offer.
I know people for whom what I described is the daily job.
Of course, the respective organization has to ensure that there do exist programmers who can maintain the software (but having to maintain it or adding new features from time to time is typically a lot less work than writing the original software from scratch).
I usually make workflows fully automated or save so much time that people just don't want to go back.
If I cannot automate the full workflow I try to get to a solution that saves as much resources as possible without actually needing the "solution" to do it. It just saves resources
Just look into a some nearly arbitrary industry/department where Excel is used extensively. Replacing some "cobbled together" Excel workbooks with properly implemented applications very often yields a lot of low-hanging fruits where you can "add value with code".