When I use shell it's often exactly because I want to construct pipelines of processes and FIFOs and do all the other things that shell does very well and has done well for decades.
I'm likely to be using Python programs and other programs in those shell scripts. The beauty of shell is that it makes it so easy to compose programs written in different languages.
Everything in a computer is a stream of bytes... My shell scripts often use tools like jq and jshon to deal with JSON structures, etc. File hierarchies can also be very pleasant data structures.
The kinds of scripts I write would be awkward to have as compiled JVM programs, I think. Shell is just way more ergonomic for me for many tasks.
Data can be meaningfully separated from control and structure in many cases, and failure to do that is a major (perhaps the major) source of security bugs.
