I agree bespoke software could have bugs, of course, but this bug seems unique to excel. I would say excel is a tool that makes it easy to solve _easy_ problems.

I do not think Excel is simple. IMO it is less intimidating to users because it is graphical and does not look like programming.

> It's not clear when "simple" stops working or how to recover from it.

Excel row limit could clearly fail in a non-silent way, and it would be a better tool. They chose "simplicity" by ignoring errors.

There are a lot of times where a low-level understanding of Computer Stuff lets me easily get problems in simple stuff. Like if I see a year that's 1969 or a number that's in the negatives and around 4 million, I know some kind of overflow happened and can work from there to diagnose the problem. I don't know the right balance, though. I know all this stuff because you just had to if you wanted to do anything with a computer beyond simple office tasks.

Even advanced stuff has nice interfaces these days. My new laptop with a dGPU comes with software that has an overclock toggle and some guidance on how to get the most out of it, warnings, etc. That's a long way from editing files to make HIMEM.SYS work so Wing Commander would run.