I've been a die-hard Linux user for about a dozen years. Recently I had to do some development with MS Powershell. I was very reluctant at first, but after getting familiar with the technology, I almost fell in love.

"Cmdlets", basically commands used in Powershell, output "objects" instead of the streams of text used in a more classical shell. Powershell has built-in tools to work with these objects. For example, you can take the output from one Cmdlet, pipe it through `SELECT` with a list of fields specified, and get a stream of objects only containing those fields. Other operations can be performed against those objects as well, such as filtering and whatnot.

Back to normal nix commands, we're starting to see more and more commands introduce direct JSON support [1]. There are even tools to translate output from common commands into JSON [2]. We'll probably see `jq` shipped directly with modern distros soon. Eventually we'll reach a tipping point where it's expected that command supports JSON output. Tools like `awk`/`sed` might get updated to have a richer support for JSON. Finally, we'll have ubiquitous Powershell-like capabilities on every nix machine.

Powershell _is_ available on Linux. The model of piping objects instead of JSON is both powerful and more efficient (For example, there's no redundant keys like in a stream of JSON objects, leading to less moving bytes, like how CSV headers aren't repeated with every row. Plus, binary data is smaller than text.) But, most developers are hesitant to switch out their shell and existing workflows for a completely new tool, which is why Powershell will likely only be adopted by a small subset of sysadmins.

[1] https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2020/03/17/curl-write-out-json/

[2] https://github.com/kellyjonbrazil/jc