I had the same thought as you and started working on something that can be described as "AirTable meets Webflow". It's basically a no-code database with drag-and-drop page builder: tables are created and linked together (like in AirTable) and interactive pages are designed to work with that data (like in WebFlow). So in other words users don't directly use a spreadsheet-like UI to work with the data. Instead they use custom-designed pages - it is both much more powerful (e.g. fully scriptable, multiple pages can be linked to form more complex workflows, which wouldn't be even possible with spreadsheets) and yet easier to use. Oh, and it's self-hosted. Judging by the response from users it does seem like something like this is really needed.
I put some pretty crude demos online about a year ago [0] ... back then the idea was to create a more general purpose no-code web app builder, but since then I decided to focus specifically on database applications.
I put some pretty crude demos online about a year ago [0] ... back then the idea was to create a more general purpose no-code web app builder, but since then I decided to focus specifically on database applications.
[0] https://www.formbeaver.com