The way i see it, shell scripting and piping allows non-programmers to get their feet wet, one command at a time.
You run a command, look at the output, now you know what the next command in the pipeline will see, and can add adjustments as needed.
Powershell etc seems to be more programmer oriented in that one keep thinking in terms of variables and structures that gets passed around.
And this seems to be the curse of recent years. More and more code is written by programmers for programmers. Likely because everyone has their head in the cloud farms and only the "front end" people has to deal with the users.
UNIX came when you risked having admins and users sitting terminal to terminal in the same university room. Thus things got made that allowed said users to deal with things on their own without having to nag the admins all the time.