Nothing can fix the fact, that pipes carry dumb byte streams. Powershell addressed this, but sadly remains unpopular in Unix crowd
Actually there are several shells out there that fix that problem and still support existing UNIX tools too (which Powershell doesn't play nice with).
My own shell, https://github.com/lmorg/murex does this by passing type information along with the byte stream. So _murex_ aware tools can have structured data passed and POSIX tools can fall back to byte streams. Best of both worlds.
The problem, however, is that as long as Bourne Shell and Bash are installed everywhere, people will write scripts for it. This is less about the popularity of UNIX tools and more about the ubiquity of them (though the two points aren't mutually exclusive).