I've done it from Excel a few times. As long as you aren't dealing with attachments and repeats (related tables) excel can be pretty fast and I find it works better for some of my purposes than ArcPro (especially if I'm loading a large number of features >3,000).
What I do is open my excel table and use a formula to convert the rows into GeoJSON. Example:
="[" & CHAR(10) & " {" & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "attributes" & CHAR(34) & " : {" & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "OBJECTID" & CHAR(34) & ": " & D2 & "," & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "Observation_pt" & CHAR(34) & ": " & CHAR(34) & R2 & CHAR(34) & "," & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "TPB_date" & CHAR(34) & ": " & (J2 - DATE(1970,1,1)) * 86400000 & CHAR(10)& " }," & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "geometry" & CHAR(34) & " : {" & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "x" & CHAR(34) & ": " & S2 & "," & CHAR(10) & " " & CHAR(34) & "y" & CHAR(34) & ": " &T2 & CHAR(10) & " }" & CHAR(10) & " },"
Subsequent rows need the formula to be tweaked slightly as the first [ is not needed. The final row needs a carriage return and a ].
This will format all of your excel into a GeoJSON. From there you can use the append in ArcGIS Online in the feature service Service URL. It's not as straight forward as ArcPro but it works really well. If you have attachments and related tables the process still works but there are more steps. However, if you didn't download a GDB this will definitely help.