Probably not a joke. In the same way people want to get away from the C language due to its propensity to memory vulnerabilities, shell scripts have their own share of footguns, the most common being a variable not being quoted when it should (which is exactly the issue described in this advisory).

It doesn't mean getting away from scripting languages; it means getting away from shell scripts in particular (the parent poster said specifically "zero shell scripts"). If the script in question was written in Lua, or heck even Javascript, this particular issue most probably wouldn't have happened, since these scripting languages do not require the programmer to manually quote every single variable use.

Not a joke. I knew they used to use a pile of janky shell scripts for their init system. I didn't know they still do. That's disappointing.

And cesarb is correct - the issue isn't scripts; it's shell scripts, especially Bash and similar. Something like Deno/Typescript would be a decent option for example. Nushell is probably acceptable.

Even Python - while a terrible choice - is a better option than shell scripts.