Bash/Sh is an objectively awful programming language. You could likely fill an entire book with all of the design fails that is Bash script syntax. Only in a shell script would you ever need eight backslash characters in a row in order to accomplish something...and "space as delimiter" is awful in so many ways.
But especially Sh runs everywhere, so it's good to know. This seems to be the article's point.
Honestly, though? The right answer is to transpile a better language to Sh.
Looking around, there have been several half-hearted, abandoned attempts. But apparently everyone is happy to just fall back on the "accidental syntax" of Bash that really doesn't make sense when compared to ... any other language.
I put up with Bash because there's no better alternative. That doesn't mean we should put up with Bash; just that we must put up with it at least to the point where it can run code written in a real language.
There was an effort within Google SRE to use Go instead of bash for all the typical usages of bash. [1]
Cloudflare uses Go similarly as a scripting language. [2]
[1]: https://go.dev/solutions/google/sitereliability [2]: https://blog.cloudflare.com/using-go-as-a-scripting-language...
Not an official Google product of course but ...
>Bash is great, but when it comes to writing more complex scripts, many people prefer a more convenient programming language. JavaScript is a perfect choice, but the Node.js standard library requires additional hassle before using. The zx package provides useful wrappers around child_process, escapes arguments and gives sensible defaults.