Data tables can also make things considerably faster. A colleague of mine once made a spreadsheet something like an order of magnitude faster by switching to data tables. (Maybe more speedup than that, even.)

Assuming all you ever care about is tabular data.

If you are building a business plan in Excel, or trying to explain how the financial accounts consolidates in a large organisation with multiple subsidiaries, tables are not particular useful.

That's the catch with Excel. One application, thousands of very different use cases.

So how do named columns help with non-tabular data?

That's my point, they don't. If your table is a complex calculation, not data, named columns don't help you.