It's true, they had a shortage of shadow puppets, the early form of Netflix.

I wish more would choose Jainism over Islam and Christianity. Many crave some kind of religion, and if such people picked the more peaceful religions there would be fewer busybodies trying to force their beliefs on others.

can the researchers really say with confidence that the civilization would still be with us today?

Nobody claimed it would otherwise still be around. You are putting words in their mouths. It only solved, or at least partly solves a mystery. Usually declines of ancient cities can be traced to invaders, civil war, damaged soil, plagues, etc. This one had no known comparable cause.

Is it possible the smoke & soot from the city changed the local weather?

They have to wine and dine a few gov't officials before that step.

They found out somebody accidentally installed Boeing bolts.

Another thing is China kind of "herds" factory workers in a way the US cannot. For example, they limit housing options near factory towns so the space can be dedicated to factories, large-scale NIMBY-ism. If a company folds, workers' temporary mini-housing makes it logistically easier to move to a new town, but it's hard on families.

Thus, biz owners have a kind of de-facto slave class that's relatively easy to shift around as needed.

This is also a form of subsidizing industry. China has managed to combine capitalism and communism in ways that give it an advantage, or at least keep it a manufacturing superpower.

As mentioned elsewhere, spreadsheets are probably the wrong tool for the for that particular job. Just because one can make a giant sheet in a spreadsheet tool doesn't mean they should. It won't have sufficient indexes to quickly do JOINs or equivalent, for example. Nor proper caching of a data, having more of a file-centric design.

For one, if a handful of work-groups need Excel, that's not a reason for the rest of the company to use Excel. Most Excel uses will be mundane things. They can allow justifiable exceptions.

but the financial staff know Excel and they know it very, very well.

Software tools/frameworks I knew well were ordered tossed because the vendor or support structure faded. It happens. Why are financial people given that latitude when almost nobody else is? Change is annoying and creates a learning curve, but inevitable in the work-place. I knew cases where employees quit over frustration over replacement-ware, but management said "we are doing it anyhow, live or leave" (paraphrased).

And I'm surprised there are not products dedicated to big org financial analysis. There might be, but "we don't wanna learn something new" lobbying may be stopping it.

Excel probably has other scaling problems they didn't mention in the article but just learned work-arounds, yet they are likely stretching Excel to its limits risking more problems, familiarity or not. Oracle Essbase allegedly is a big-org financial modelling tool. I don't like Oracle the company, but Essbase & competitors may be a better tool for that particular job. See what other big orgs use.

which matches their brain-cell count

If you are an inventor or any kind of "creative", and you get AI to make something cool, take credit for it as a human, you don't have to tell anybody its from AI. If somebody spots AI artifacts, just say "I used AI to assist me".

Committees can convolutize anything. Some mamby pamby or non-IT manager won't say "no" and so every feature requests ends up in the spec, making a mess. Good managers know when to say "no".

Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.

Time for a database, people. You are using the wrong tool for the job.

Switching from Microsoft to Google is like switching from Hitler to Mussolini. Move to Libre Office or the like.

...involved