This makes me think of a system that just got replaced where I work - multiple hundreds of temporary workers being tracked through their setup and onboarding processes through one massive Excel spreadsheet, saved on a shared Teams group that everyone edited at once. It was held together with prayers, fickle filters, custom views and loose validation rules and I hated it the whole time it was active. We'd frequently have to make sure to remove rows from it and put them in an archive spreadsheet to keep the main one performant enough to function - but that split made it difficult to sift through data when someone had an issue. Not to mention that records routinely went missing or got overlooked.

It's now a SharePoint database - I don't know what I think of that, but at least it was built for the job and has some solid integrations with other systems in it that make life easier.