I think for the way most people use excel it’s adequate and in some ways superior (e.g. I made a cute weekly chores-tracking sheet with photos on it for the fridge), and presume that’s why Apple appears to have stopped work going on it.
If you’re even a halfway serious user of Excel than indeed, Numbers is a complete joke. But if google sheets would work for you numbers probably would too.
Sheets is actually pretty powerful. I can do 99% of what I used to do with Excel. Numbers is way under-featured in comparison. I would categorize Numbers as “family-friendly” and Excel and Sheets as “business-friendly”. Only Excel gets “finance-friendly” and I’m not sure about that anymore. My finance partners now deliver all my budget read outs via Sheets.
I think Numbers is a great spreadsheet application. It just doesn't even try to be the kind of spreadsheet application that can be abused as a poor man's DBMS.
For simpler tasks where a spreadsheet program is obviously the right tool for the job, Numbers tends to be plenty capable and give a nicer user experience than Excel and clones. For example, a few weeks ago I discovered that Numbers is vastly better at doing time-related calculations than Excel.
Numbers fails completely when you start moving into the problem domains where a SQL database and/or scripting language are good tools to consider.
If you’re even a halfway serious user of Excel than indeed, Numbers is a complete joke. But if google sheets would work for you numbers probably would too.