Most devs are not deeply steeped in Unix, and don't really know what they're doing with this as it's not their main job. They kinda clobber something together that "kinda works" – right up to the point it doesn't.

There is no shame in that; I do that with some stuff too – we all do – because there is no point learning something in-depth if you use it once a year. This is not a "zomg devs are stoopid" rant, it's just an observation of fact.

I've written tons of shell scripts and and I love how it enables you to do something useful very quickly in very little code. Last week I hacked together a "ncurses"-type terminal music player in less than 200 lines which actually works fairly well, which I thought wasn't too bad for an evening of work.

But in general I distrust other people's shell scripts, and I found that 9 times out of 10 that's warranted. I tend to push for zsh as it fixes the most egregious footguns and limitations, but there's still plenty of things to do wrong, and the syntax can be unfamiliar.