Yeah, pretty sure that having to use an ETL layer before Excel qualifies as "It's literally impossible to do it in Excel".
> Use XLOOKUP.
It's only available after Excel 2019, and the behavior is different. There's also nothing that seems to indicate that it doesn't have the same issue with column types?
You can do this in Powerquery.
>VLOOKUP when the data type of the 2 columns is not exactly the same for example).
Use XLOOKUP.