Shell is a crappy scripting language because it has primitive data structures and data flow control making it hard to manage and manipulate data as you process it between applications. The fact that newlines are such a problem is a case in point.

Python is a crappy shell scripting language because the syntax around pipe and subprocess is really clunky.

Perl managed to have decent data structures and also have decent syntax around subprocess calls.

But I feel like the Python invoke module gives me everything I need wrt subprocess calls. I basically write any nontrivial "shell script" these days as a Python invoke command.

I assume you refer to https://www.pyinvoke.org/ which I just looked up. It looks quite promising, thanks for the heads-up.