Are you asking me to defend shell script syntax, or are you criticizing this except from a shell script?

The awk and printf are as obscure and unreadable as Perl, but still probably faster than just starting Perl.

Ironically, in terms of portability, it's probably more likely that awk and printf are installed than Python (or Perl). This application doesn't need Python in the (devcontainer) container, and nobody does sysadmin scripts with lua (which can't `export VARNAME` for outer shells) so shell scripting is justified though indeed arcane.

Getopt is hardly more understandable than a few loops through $@ with case statements.

I don't understand the relevance of other tools to "getting decent error reports in Bash"?

There are great logging (and TAP testing) libraries in Python, but that doesn't solve for debugging Bash?

There is at least one debugger for Bash scripts.