Excel for Mac does not respect the MacOS system date format,

Excel for Mac does not respect the MacOS system date format, and continues to default to mm/dd/yy regardless of your macOS settings—even when General > Language & Region > Date Format is set to something else (in my case yyyy-mm-dd). This seems to be a known issue, and there is currently no built-in way to force Excel to use the system format as its default for new files or for presenting dates in the existing files.

This started happening several months ago and I find it difficult to believe that it still persists. Anyone knows if there is a solution? Not a workaround (I am very familiar with those) but a real solution?