I can find bad examples of how things work in basically every department I chose if I look long enough. Are there IT-Managed things that border on insanity? Oh yes. Are these a good excuse to build a shadow IT? No, they are not.
Don't get me wrong: I'm not bothered at all when a couple analysts get together and hack away at their own little tools in VBA. Kudos to them for getting into the spirit of things, and maybe they will understand my day to day better as a result.
Whatdoesbother me, is when these analysts suddenly expect my systems architecture to somehow accomodate their private projects in whatever capacity. When I ask for documentation (there isn't any), an architectural overview (nope), or even access to the repo for that abomination (access to a what now?).
Because, why shouldn't their spreadsheet inject data into my processing pipeline? Why shouldn't I write a controller that accomodates whatever tidbits of REST they bothered to watch half a youtube video about? When suddenly I get asked this in a meeting:"What do you mean we need authentication? Why does IT always have to make things so complicated?!?".
So yeah, please, people should absolutely build their VBA, lowcode or whatever tools. I do the same thing, the only difference is, I call them shellscripts, and they live in git repo.
But same as I don't let my CLI tools lose on the production server, I won't let it happen with things that have never even been through one code review.
Let's face it: IT is the bureaucracy department of modern times which can keep itself 95% busy with self inflicted problems and has 5% service orientation. Processes are opaque for outsiders and typically not helpful.
I really had to lough when I read the following description of the IBM BPM but this sums up a good part of the issue:
Quite a lot of things became so outragedly complex no one outside of the IT bothers to handle these, and sometimes not even inside IT. It started with AJAX where suddenly half of the development effort went into designing frontend code and backend services, which honestly does not even touch the end users automation problem. And it went further downhill afterwards. UIs nowadays look modern but are generally as user hostile as the technology stack used to produce these.In Excel my UI is just "there", I have a nice code generator aka as macro recorder, no IT department questioning my authorization to do something nor does not have time or budget to help me with my business problem.
So VBA is the workaround for users around the IT department. Not perfect, but better than what you would get else.