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As someone that often finds myself using spreadsheets to merge, refine, organize, or otherwise work with different datasets, I would say that the simplest 10% of features cover about 90% of my use-cases. It's rare that I need to go digging for anything truly complex (usually VLOOKUP is as hard as it gets). Most data is indeed simple.

I agree, I think most people just need something one step up from a calculator that they can persist on a hard drive and create basic pivot tables/charts from.

Having this ability is a huge advantage over a calculator.

100% agree. There's a good reason spreadsheets have lasted since lotus 123 (1983) to now, you can get so much millage from the simple idea of of a grid of values.

I think visicalc was the first general purpose widely used spreadsheet by the general population (office people/at home)

The argument could be made, that without VisiCalc there would be no iPhone (if you connect enough dots)

Yep... 15 years manipulating data, etl etc etc and Excel is always my go to.