I think you can replace excel completely with combinations of a basic spreadsheet program like Libreoffice with other more powerful tools including python, Matlab, maple, SQL databases, rust (🦀) etc, but only if you never intend on working with another human or organisation again. Because ultimately you’ll need to send something to someone, and starting any email with “right, the instructions on opening/running this file: so first you’re going to need to install rust…” is in immediate non starter, and even if you can get round that, in return they’ll still send you some hideous spreadsheet with 3000 different vba functions and powerqueries of multiple databases and you haven’t a hope in hell of making that work outside of excel in any viable timeframe.

Excel is sadly the standard and it’s really powerful and a lot of people use that power. This means until something fully emulates all the functionality of excel (a moving target in itself) you’re stuck with using excel. Even though I'm on Linux 80% of the time, I have a windows machine for work that’s purpose is to run excel.