But wouldn't it help the non technical user more if Magento, Shopify etc supported the much more widely used standard of xlsx? Then people don't have to find out what UTF-8 even is. Library support for reading Excel docs is pretty good now, isn't it?
I wish Excel did support csv better, but we are in the .001% of Excel users who even know that it doesn't do a good job.
XLSX isn't actually a standard in a meaningful sense. So while support for whatever parts are standard is "pretty good" how does that help your users when some of their sheets don't work correctly? Who wants to explain what's wrong and that nobody can fix it but er... maybe better luck next time?
XLSX (Office Open XML) is full of safety valves that let Microsoft's existing products continue doing whatever poorly documented or undocumented stuff they were doing previously. Microsoft didn't want to have to go back to features which worked in Office already and either rip them out or re-implement them, and it didn't have documentation for those features that anybody else would be able to implement‡. So Office Open XML just says in those cases well here's a blob of data and good luck unless you're Microsoft Office.
This is tolerable for exporting to Excel. I can emit compliant Office Open XML that gets my numbers into XL reliably. So that's nice.
But when importing from Excel you're fighting that impedance mismatch. Rather than explain to users "Something about your document is incompatible and I swear it's Microsoft's fault" it's just better to say "Use CSV".
‡ e.g. suppose there's a line in Excel which defines a function FOO() by calling into some particular Windows DLL. Well that's not a useful thing to standardise. So do you call the relevant MS department and ask them to paste all their documentation for that DLL into your "spreadsheet" standard? No. You write "Implementation defined" and it becomes a black box.
XLSX is not remotely the same as CSV. CSV is way more widely used than you think under the hood of stuff and is a muuuuuch more slimmed down format. It's litterally just values separated by a delimiter.
XLSX also isn't a standard. It'll keep changing.
It's one of those reasons why Microsoft tried to shoehorn their own trash Open document format that would fit them and let them keep backwards compatibility with stoneage versions of their office suite. https://www.computerweekly.com/news/2240225262/Microsoft-att...
It's like saying everyone should have adapted to internet explorer rather than following proper web standards. Even if XSLX was some kind of standard it's a bad idea because at the end of the day MS shouldn't be trusted with those.
I wish Excel did support csv better, but we are in the .001% of Excel users who even know that it doesn't do a good job.