I once worked on a janky, held-together-with-duct-tape-and-bubblegum distributed app written in Microsoft Access. Yes, Microsoft Access for everything, no central server, no Oracle, no Postgres. Data was shared between client and server by HTTP downloads of zipped-up Access .mdb files which got merged into the clients' main database.

The main architect of the app told me, "Before we came along, they wer doing all this with Excel spreadsheets. This is a vast improvement!"