I think it’s one of my all time favorites. I think people here live in the tech literate bubble who know how to use specialized software for the different things excel does, albeit clunkily. But average people are intimidated by those more advanced tools, and there are a lot of average people in decision making positions who benefit greatly from being able to use excel.
I recently tried switching to mint from the dark side, but the instability made me go back to Windows. I’d say everything doesn’t ‘just work’ on mint at all, unless you have the most basic needs in your usage. Whenever I’ve tried to raise the issues with seasoned Linux user, the answer has been “well, most regular people don’t need to do that specific thing”.
So if it’s true that Mint is the only Linux distro that “just works”, then Linux is definitely not even close to being suitable as a mainstream choice. Which really saddens me, as I felt much better on a moral level using mint, but I couldn’t live with the little annoyances that kept popping up. So now I live with the annoyances that pop up in windows instead .