But is the cloud version of Excel feature parity with the desktop for the pro users that claim that Google sheets isn't good enough? If the cloud version of Google sheets is the same as the cloud version of Excel, then that's not the same thing at all.

I don't think people are remotely aware how Good MS tools are atm when it comes to collaboration and integration with their "other" suit of tools. Yes, it's ugly sharepoint under the hood somewhere, but for all intents and purposes it looks and works like magic when I'm collaborating in real-time with my coworkers over any sort of MS document. This whole "real time collaboration" comment as a reason to prefer some half-baked and confusing "GSheets" web app is frankly confusing.

Though, now that I think about it, it kind of makes sense: We are in an industry where the newcomers are being indoctrinated via evangelists and overall Schadenfreude, into using half-baked "IDEs" like VSCode.