People praise MS Word and Excel there, shitting down on Markdown and proper languages.

The thing is, you have RTF covering a 99% of actual office cases. For the rest, a DTP would be far better, or Texmacs which is far superior for academics. The old WordPad with tables (and Ted for Unix once it's properly setup) would enough to do most boring documentation.

On Excel, just look what happened with Genomics. Also, overabusing Access for management (or worse, to handle Covid cases in a shitty XLS table) it's a nightmare.

For tons of cases TCL/Tk + a Sqlite3 backend would perfectly work and it would be accesible to any platform, from GNU/Linux to MacOS, BSD, Windows. You can stick an HTML5 frontend with ease without even needing JS to access the data (plain HTML forms would work really well).

Ah, yes, graphs, charts. Gnuplot would help you in that case, or a fast Tk package. Reports? TkHTML with some easy CSS. It would cost far more initially? The potential risks on compatibility would be nil in a future. And, as a plus, yo don't have to worry about Macro viruses and whatever.