But I don’t have to use any apps from the store, in fact I’d say that at my company there aren’t any apps available on the store that we use. So the parent is right, it’s perfectly usable without ever touching iCloud. I don’t think I’ve ever even opened the settings for it on my work laptop

Apple certainly uses Numbers, Pages, etc. internally extensively, so you really do have to sign into an iCloud account as an employee.

That's rough. Not just the iCloud thing but, Numbers is so much worse than Excel or even Google Sheets.

Not anymore, it’s been slowly improving over the years and is pretty good now.

I'm saying it's bad because my new work laptop has Numbers instead of Excel ;_; There are CSVs I had to import into GSheets because Numbers was choking.