First crap is the WYSIWYG model, it produce not so nice results and demand very complex UIs. To produce high quality documents LaTeX so far is the best tool, PostScript itself is not known essentially anymore, {La,}TeX is often wrapper for instance in R RMD/Quarto docs to produce nice printouts, it's the de facto standard of scientific typeset and have so far no better competitors, so it's a wise choice.
Second crap is the spreadsheet concept, yes sometimes we need tables, and compute something on them. Org-mode show a simple example of table computing without being a spreadsheet, R is another, most modern NotebookUIs from Mathematica to Jupyter do the same as well. Spreadsheets was an idea to offer limited data manipulation to computer illiterate, and failed. The long tail of disasters suggest it's time to abandon such model. So we need something to store data. sv works well for non-giant dataset, they are simple than some ML dialects, for more SQLite is a popular powerful tool offering a self-contained easy to move storage. I do not like it, but for various things is good, for the rest it's deadly simple to export the DB in some other formats.
We should re-create the Smalltalk desktop model, the end-user programming concept that happen anyway today but hyper limited and in user-unfriendly ways. Take a look at Pharo, than image not just the bare bone environment but something developed like Emacs today. You imaging this: http://augmentingcognition.com/assets/Kay1977.pdf or http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/xerox/xsis/XSIS_Smalltalk_Produ... for the modern world.
Back than it fails because of high costs and general ignorance, people simply do not understand the power of this model so feel no need of it. Such legacy burden plague much the present IT as well, with people still imaging files as sheets and folders as suspended folders full of paper sheets in a drawer. Mentally most people have issue going past the paper tool even today. But today we have hw costs small enough and computers themselves spread enough to push again such model.
This model is the nightmare of all big of IT, from old IBM to modern GAFAM, because they know they can't compete with a FLOSS networked desktops model. That's why they do what they can to keep people on the old mainframe model, now the cloud, and many ignoring this keep mimicking the big e powerful not understanding that they try to replicate an archaic model born out of some Xerox spoils once they see how to change them in anti-users ways.
The "FLOSS alternative to" is the networked, end-user programmable desktop model, not some sightly different clone of some GAFAM platform.
