I doubt I misunderstand it since this is what I get paid for. I'm also not suggesting this is a case of large data, ETL or anything like that. (what I'm writing about is people using it for that anyway which is what we have other systems for and they should not be doing that)
Our finance teams use excel too, but not as the 'do everything' tool that the article and plenty of comments here makes it out to be. They use it as a scratchpad, and it works well. But it doesn't contain ground truth, ever.
This one perhaps matches with 99% of the rant I wrote:
> Then inventory, maybe the ERP didn't split it in the way your consolidation needs it, so you transform the data in Excel and reconcile it back
While we primarily deal with Dynamics (AX and 365), pretty much everything fits in there. In some cases the clunky UI makes it slow to do some transformations, even if just to check something to (as you wrote, verify the software did what it was supposed to do), and then you dump a couple of thousand rows out, do your work, and either are happy with what was verified or load some transformed data back in (this hasn't really been needed as we revised our rules as to data locations a few years ago, not in terms of "do this or you get fired" but in terms of "please make sure that when external systems outside of your team streams data in or out of the ERP, the chance of it not being correct is as low as you can get it").
As I wrote in some other reply (which some people appear to disagree with as if it's something I made up), my issue is with the horror cases of people building their own mini-ERP in a set of excel workbooks, or not using shared systems for data sharing and governance but instead emailing files around. Maybe it's the little learning being a dangerous thing, or feeling confident in a tool also giving people false confidence to perform actions that really should not be done that way.