> My understanding is that, way under the hood, a set of shell scripts is in fact enabling the scalable nature of… the internet.

I sure hope not. The state of error handling in shell scripts alone is enough to disqualify them for serious production systems.

If you're extremely smart and disciplined it's theoretically possible to write a shell script that handles error states correctly. But there are better things to spend your discipline budget on.

My half tongue-in-cheek comment was implying things like "you can't boot a linux/bsd box without shell scripts" which would make the whole "serving a website" bit hard.

I realize that there exists OS's that are an exception to this rule. I didn't understand the comment about scripts scaling. It's a script, it can do whatever you want.