I don't love Notion for some things, but I haven't found anything better for mixing structured data and notes in a flexible-but-consistent way.
If I wanted to do something like their databases (large sets of notes with enforced fields of different types including relational links, tags, attached files, with dead easy data entry, autocompletion, search and extraction, all presented in an acceptably pleasing way) in Excel, it would take me hours of tweaking. In Notion, it's 10 minutes before I'm starting to enter data (not to mention the price).
Data validation in excel is literally a couple of clicks.
I am not sure UI of Notion is better than Excel but that's a person preference but I am sure Excel can handle many orders of magnitude more data than Notion.
If I wanted to do something like their databases (large sets of notes with enforced fields of different types including relational links, tags, attached files, with dead easy data entry, autocompletion, search and extraction, all presented in an acceptably pleasing way) in Excel, it would take me hours of tweaking. In Notion, it's 10 minutes before I'm starting to enter data (not to mention the price).