Every criticism, like this one, of spreadsheets getting unwieldy and confusing and difficult to untangle is entirely applicable to most internal code bases as well. Technical debt, old languages, uncommented code blocks, obsolete anti-patterns, tied to some vendor product or github repo that has been discontinued/abandoned, code copy-and-pasted from Stack Overflow (or ChatGPT generated) that nobody ever understood, horribly inefficient database calls, etc etc.
Further, even a big messy Excel model (including VBA code) is usually self-contained in a single file, while a code-based model can be dozens or hundreds of files, many of which are support libraries for stuff that's built-in to Excel (front-end, vector math, charting). And lets not get started on breaking up a model into distributed microservices!
Further, even a big messy Excel model (including VBA code) is usually self-contained in a single file, while a code-based model can be dozens or hundreds of files, many of which are support libraries for stuff that's built-in to Excel (front-end, vector math, charting). And lets not get started on breaking up a model into distributed microservices!