I’m going to humbly suggest you are rejecting spreadsheets for much the same reason people who aren’t comfortable with analog clocks reject them. It’s not a skill you’ve ever become comfortable with.
why i think learning any spreadsheet is good enough
I’ve watched the development of spreadsheet software over time. Early electronic spreadsheets were very accessible to people who grew up with giant green sheets of paper. There was a period when it was a joke that older actuaries weren’t comfortable with software (i once saw an ad that basically said, “our software is powerful enough for the kids, and simple enough that their boss will understand it”) and i worked with actuaries who struggled with email, etc. But an actuary who struggled with Lotus 123 was as rare as a writer who struggled with word processors.
I grew up with Lotus 123, having only a year or two of using calculators that produced a printed record before spreadsheets became commonplace. And being good at 123 made the basics of Excel easy. And being a strong Excel user made me able to help my son do complex things in Google sheets even though i had never tried anything like that in Sheets, and it’s syntax is somewhat different.
These skills are, IMHO, highly transferrable. I have never created a graph in Google sheets, but i endorse that as a fine choice of a tool for kids, because it’s free, it’s widely used, and if you can make good graphs in Google sheets, you are going to be able to transfer that skill to the next thing (which might well be powered with AI.) I say that confidently, and I’m about to go attempt to make a graph in Sheets just in case. If I’m wrong, I’ll return and apologize.
Again, i don’t know whether it’s worth adding spreadsheet skills to the 5th-7th grade curriculum, but i think you can make an excellent case for it, similar to the case for analog clocks.