It strikes me as rather odd that a discipline in which a person purports to be on solid analytical ground would eschew learning how to write their research and modeling code in Fortran, C, C++, Scala, Python, etc. I can't think of a single colleague of mine, when I was in academia, who did not know how to write code in at least one of the languages you mentioned. That's because such knowledge is necessary to do rigorous, proper numerical computation in an analytical discipline like math, a variety of sciences and, yes, economics.

The "GIGO" issue you note is irrelevant, but even if it weren't GIGO is compounded and amplified by the copy-and-paste paradigm of spreadsheet "programming", so if anything bringing up GIGO is even more damning of the use of spreadsheets for analytical work.