As someone who lives in Excel, has done quite a bit of BI as well, and is learning programming I love that Excel gives you the ability to build complex algorithms but also to sometimes bypass it and just hardcode some stuff that would require complex loops or recursion, and create exceptions by breaking a formula into a few pieces in different cells that would likewise require a lot of ugly code.

It empowered me to build what I needed, but may have held back my progress in building better mental models for data schemas and algos. You win some, you lose some I guess.