I'm indifferent between Numbers, Excel and Google Sheets.
Do you have a sense of which would do what I needed best?
I think they would all be fine.
If I wanted to use SQLite, how do I get that set up on the Mac? What program do i run? How do I automatically add data and then query the results?
SetApp comes with SQLPro for SQLite which I have used and seems fine. DB Browser for SQLite and TablePlus are other free (at least at the start) applications. I do not use SQLite enough to be an expert at all. I only use it under duress because I have not invested the time to be comfortable with it. I have extensively used 4D which is an expensive database product but from this contact, I became familiar with database concepts and language. The problem is while the resources for SQLite exist at low or no cost, becoming fluent takes a lot of time.
Similarly Python. Macs used to come with version 2.7 but you do not want to use that. If you want to jump into Python, version 3.9 from python.org would make sense. Again, the problem is that while Python is free, there needs to be a big investment of your time to learn it. Even just managing its software on your Mac takes time and can be confusing.
There are plenty of reasons to learn Python and SQLite. Both are hugely powerful. But since it will take months to really grok these things, I would not want to have to learn them to solve a small problem. Their great potential is that they can solve a whole slew of problems. Python in particular is fun to learn but it is a big project.