More like we can’t name things (eg. gene names) the way scientists want because of needing to work with the data in Excel. So instead of OCT4 we get a different name because Excel mangled the name into a date for decades.

Excel is still the easiest way to look at tabular data, even if it isn’t part of the production workflow. And sadly, even if you save the file as txt, Excel would always mangle certain fields.

So yes… users have been working around Excel-isms for years.