Airtable has a learning curve, but it's life-changing once you're comfortable with it. To me, it felt like discovering spreadsheets when I had only worked with documents before.
Really? I found it significantly more limiting than what I can accomplish in Google Sheets / Excel (although admittedly I'm a power user). The UI and mobile app is way better though.
We run a fairly large business on it, and it's great from a UI standpoint, but for anything complex (such as reporting) we do dumps to Google Sheets where we run formulas to extract what we need. If I was starting all over, most likely I'd go directly for Google Sheets next time.
I would characterize myself as an Excel power user, and I love Airtable. The use case is different. Airtable is great for setting up a web-based relational DB app for multiple users very quickly.
For example, I have used airtable to implement a CRM system for a small but distributed team of non-technical users. I haven’t found anything else that allows me to set up such an application so easily and quickly.