I just tried it in R. The relevant package seems to be "arrow", so I did

    install.packages("arrow")

and then I did

    ?read_parquet

to get an example. I tried the example, and got the error message as follows. This sort of error is really quite uncommon in R. So my answer to the "with little effort" is "no", at least for R.

    > tf<-tempfile()
    > write_parquet(mtcars, tf)
    Error in parquet___WriterProperties___Builder__create() : 
  Cannot call parquet___WriterProperties___Builder__create(). See https://arrow.apache.org/docs/r/articles/install.html for help installing Arrow C++ libraries.

Exactly. The author even opens the article with the nice trivia that CSV has been in use since the 1970s. I don't think anyone disputes that CSV is a very primitive format. But I hope no one uses CSV because it is so performant or well-designed. It is used exactly because it is so universal, which makes the point of comparing against almost any other format moot unless they were around in the 1970s, too.

More importantly, can you open parquet files in Excel?