Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
Does an excel-based solution offer adequate runtime performance? No
Does an excel-based solution offer adequate write concurrency? No
Does an excel-based solution offer appropriate data durability guarantees? No
Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.
Incredibly weird thing to say with Russia just having spent around 2 decades routinely violating our airspace at Gotland, and with them quite literally cutting up our undersea cables in the Baltic on a weekly basis.
There's potential for mitigating some of the negative impacts using a mixed approach, although I'm not convinced it's going to be straightforward or even worthwhile.
Using retirees as a tool to work against property taxes has historically been an effective strategy, but it's important to remember:
What we're actually trying to accomplish
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
One-by-one:
What we're actually trying to accomplish
Seems to me that the root question is one of housing affordability, in particular for retirees, who may have a lot of assets, but limited cash flow
Will the proposed change be effective in accomplishing the goal
Reducing/capping property taxes does indeed make it easier for some retirees to keep affording their homes, but reducing property taxes makes real estate a more lucrative investment, driving up the overall prices of real estate. This applies for both private persons intending to use the property to live in, for private persons looking seek rent, and corporate actors doing the same. Messing with property taxes is a large part of the housing affordability issue present in many places in the U.S and elsewhere (zoning laws being another major contributor, in particular those mandating single family homes, and lack of public housing being the other major contributor). Hence, this change would only benefit those lucky enough to have purchased a home in the past, at the expense of all retirees not already that lucky, which are now less likely to be able to do so.
Will the change have other consequences that are negative to the extent where the potential benefits outweigh the consequences in aggregate
Apart from driving up the prices of real estate for other retirees, everyone else interested in purchasing a home will also feel this broad increase in prices. This has led to large swaths of the population being effectively priced out of home ownership. This has the second order effect of making owning rentals more lucrative, as higher rents can be charged, further exacerbating the larger problem of housing affordability, but now also for even poorer people.
Finally, reductions in real estate taxes limit what public services can be funded through their use. In the U.S, this primarily means schools, infrastructure, firefighting, transit etc, all of which are suffering a lot in quality, much as a consequence of having messed with property taxes in the past.
There's a very, very strong case to be made that the consequences have very much outweighed the benefits in this scenario. I would even say that they have been devastating, being part of the root cause of a large amount of issues seen today.
Are there any alternative means to accomplish the original goal
There clearly are good means to tackle this problem in other ways, the principal of which I believe should be massive public investment in social housing. By building a huge supply of high quality homes affordable to everyone, we make sure no one will have to be forced to go without an acceptable home, regardless of whether they are retired or not.
The second strategy should be to entirely remove the kind of zoning laws that have contributed to the kind of increase in housing prices seen today - mandating that only single family homes should be allowed to be built on massive lots with low utilization is hugely harmful to housing affordability.
These two measures would address housing prices having gone up in the way they have historically, which would also lead to property taxes not rising in such a dramatic fashion.
What should never be done, however, is reducing or capping property taxes.
You're broadly going to have a bad time trying to force the wrong language for the job, fwiw.
You could always stop doing web frontend dev - there's plenty of other stuff in programming to do. If you're into UI dev, then modern native mobile dev runs on either Kotlin for Android or Swift for iOS, both of which are highly competent languages. Their modern UI toolkits are Jetpack Compose for Android and SwiftUI for iOS, both of which are reactive in the style of React, but unburdened by the shortcomings of JavaScript.
Anything Turing-complete is a powerful tool, but the reason people are reacting negatively is because of how much of the wrong tool it is.
Basically the only saving grace of Excel-based solutions is that they are built in tools that finance workers comprehend, and that is quite simply not enough. To base systems at this scale on Excel is criminally negligent.