I’d rather program a normal way than try to wrangle some of the abominations I’ve seen in excel sheets

That’s the way I also think about learning fancy spreadsheet stuff. Spreadsheets are good for putting data into a graph. They’re good for basic numeric stuff where there’s a simple pattern that repeats. But, pretty soon you’re in a situation where you should either have a real database or a real program. If you’re doing a lot of manipulation of data, you should have a program with loops, conditionals, errors, exceptions, etc. and most importantly with comments. If you’re storing a lot of data, you should be using a real database, not hundreds of lines in a spreadsheet.

If, at the end, you do want something visual, and don’t feel like dealing with a graphics library, you can always export the data to a CSV and import that into a spreadsheet.