Sirach sits in a peculiar position in Jewish tradition: excluded and quoted. The rabbis placed it outside the sacred books, and a passage in the Talmud lists it among works that do not defile the hands, the technical marker of scriptural status. Yet rabbinic literature cites Ben Sira by name and quotes his sayings, sometimes with a formula otherwise reserved for scripture, more often as the words of a respected sage; a much later work, the Alphabet of Ben Sira, borrowed his name outright for material he never wrote. Jews went on reading and copying the Hebrew book for a thousand years after it was ruled out, which is precisely why there was anything for the Geniza to preserve.
Christian use went the other way and went heavily. The book's supply of quotable moral instruction made it a standard text for catechesis and preaching in the Latin church, so standard that it acquired the name Ecclesiasticus, the church book, meaning the one used for teaching in church, and that name rather than the author's still heads it in many Bibles. It is quoted constantly by the Fathers and drawn on in the liturgy.
Its canonical position follows the usual pattern with one wrinkle. Jerome knew it stood outside the Hebrew canon and said so; the western church used it regardless; Trent in 1546 defined it as canonical for Catholics; the Orthodox churches receive it among the books to be read. The reformers put it in the Apocrypha, but Luther, sparing with praise for the disputed books, judged this one genuinely profitable for ordinary readers, and it remained in Protestant devotional use long after some of its neighbours had fallen out of it.