1. Some things done in everyday practice have big inefficiencies, or give the illusion of productivity and progress, and desperation can force a team to realize that.
2. A lot of tools are driven by enterprise sales, which means they target needs of large companies with very different needs than a startup-like team (in which it's easier to have everyone on the same page, aligned, and barriers removed).
3. A lot of tools are driven by enterprise sales, which can mean that the people who select and approve them aren't the people with experience using them. (And sometimes a team is forced to use poor tools, with adverse impact on effectiveness and morale, and then you get into a budget meeting, and see the SaaS fees the company is paying for those tears (TaaS).)
4. There are definitely projects I can't handle in a spreadsheet (most of them). But, when SHTF, and priorities change, the number of things you're focused on gets smaller and more in everyone's heads, the spreadsheet or text file might be most rapid to work with. (For SHTF deadline-hitting in another, much larger, startup, I would've forced everything into a canonical Gantt chart, just because the interdependencies were too complex, and declared the tons of Jira sprint Issues and manual team reports to be confusing and time-wasting noise, and everyone works&reports first from the Gantt.)
