Rather than a sense of "cool" or "useful" somehow I end up just feeling despair at how organically convoluted it is to determine what something on a command-line really does. To be fair, I've always been biased towards "only the simplest scripts should be in shell languages."

This also adds an intriguing new dimensions to reviewing/verifying shell commands as benign and correct... How long until LLMs start (ab)using the trick in little requests they want me to approve?

Maybe it's a bit like current C++ language spec:

There's enough complexity in the language spec that most people stick with a (fairly shared) subset.

Bash can be very powerful, but IMHO there's a certain point where I find it saner to accomplish the same thing via Python.

man bash. That's the secret. man bash.