and yet all these businesses run excel in production. I'd rather implement R code (with localizreed variables and dumb algorithms, so there's something funny in it) than an excel-spreadsheet. But somehow there's a difference...
They really don't. I've been at such an org as described by OP. I've owned a system of production R/Excel and it was migrated to cloud + python + ETL over 4 years.
The places where Excel are used are fairly appropriate. Way downstream, for simple tasks.
A lot of hard science is still done on the back of Excel, only begrudgingly adopting a data science mindset as the instruments produce more and more data. Data science is more than just streaming data, data lakes and machine learning.
Visual programming platforms like Knime is the next step for these teams, and then onto something like RStudio as they complete the transition towards employing data science in their pipelines.
