I personally dislike this behavior in Excel, as I'm accustomed to working with plaintext data and using pandas/strftime to get datetimes as I need them. But I also figure that my situation as a technical user is likely in the minority, compared to people who are using spreadsheets every day to do manual data entry.
That said, I completely agree with the tangential issue of U.S. dates being misleadingly different in format compared to non-U.S. Always an issue when teaching data/spreadsheets to a class with at least one non-American – but also a good reason to teach them the value of ISO8601 :)
It's not just about data entry. Entering dates properly in excel allows you to calculate with dates.
If you want to know what date and time it will be 476 days and 12 hours from today you can just do =TODAY()+476.5
This is very useful when the requirement is to 'happen every 10 days' or you're looking for '30 days in the past'
Excel has a very low barrier of entry compared to pandas while boasting an immense amount of power and features. I think it was not an easy challenge to keep it going over the decades.
> US dates
I'm a non-US person and I fixed this simply by changing my locale to enUS everywhere. It has an added benefit of not having weird translations of everything in random tools and excel functions not being localized to their cringy versions in my native tongue.
That said, I completely agree with the tangential issue of U.S. dates being misleadingly different in format compared to non-U.S. Always an issue when teaching data/spreadsheets to a class with at least one non-American – but also a good reason to teach them the value of ISO8601 :)