…you always need some sort of shell to call the binaries, don’t you?

I do think it makes sense to have beginners use `sh` instead of `bash`.

Oh, "once upon a time" I did set emacs to be my login "shell" and emacs can call other binaries via execve, handle sub processes, etc. Worked as expected.

Getting a Linux or Unix system to boot without a proper shell would be another complication, so a system completely without a she'll? I expect that to either be easy nor useful.