Totally agree. I’m working for a company right now that put off ‘refactoring’ their tangle of spreadsheets and database query export ‘pipelines’ for over a decade. We are hemorrhaging money right now because it does not scale. And you won’t notice that until it all breaks down.

Now you have effectively created bottlenecks for all critical processes because simultaneously working on spreadsheets is about the most dangerous thing you can do. Data integration becomes a perilous and time consuming affair; there’s no easy way to guarantee conformity between spreadsheets.

You paper over these problems with more code than you ever would have had if you switched to the proper tools earlier.