This is exactly what I do with my personal computing. I would prefer to be on linux, but a lot of people still sends me data in excel spreadsheets for processing, and lets be honest: apple hardware is fucking awesome.

The feeling of being able to work away from my desk and dont care about battery, is so goooooooood.

And I have to admit. Even if I dont like macos, my macbook with m1 and 16gb ram is probably the fastest laptop I ever own.

Excel for Mac has gotten a lot better - but I'm not surprised if it is still its own thing - with edge cases in format, macros, visual basic, linking to databases and data sources etc. I imagine excel under wine is better than the port to Mac in some respects.

I'd guess PowerPivot and PowerQuery

You'd think it's third party the way it locks up a file or makes it so you can't basic things like interacting with filters

I'm honestly not sure. I'm sure my dad Googled something to use it as an excuse to not change.

As I said in a sibling comment, I think they really just don't want to change and they are looking for excuses; I suspect even if I could prove that there's absolute feature parity between the two versions they'd just find another reason.