Excel is a nice job-creation measure for freelancers.
Re-implementing such sheet in C# was a full time job for several years for me.
Modern development tools (in contrast to C or Assembler) help the user to maintain its sanity by preventing him from hurting himself. You need much less of unspoken practices to develop in Java then in C. And you will hurt yourself much later.
The same goes for databases. You need much less foresight when you write SQL, but the optimizer will be overwhelmed sooner or later, if you are doing something complex.
I would say that CubeWeaver prevents the user from shooting himself in the foot for much longer than Excel.
I don't think you can address the downsides without completely redesigning Excel.
There were some attempts to add loops, IFs and so on to the assembly language. Somehow this approach could not compete with Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language#Support_for_...
CubeWeaver is a .NET web application. It is available as a SaaS product and as a downloadable Desktop Edition (based on electron.js). Check out the download page: https://cubeweaver.com/download