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.
The issue is POSIX standardizing legacy stuff like shells, thereby tempting people to write "portable" software, leading these technologies to ossify and stick with us for half a century and counting. Someone comes along and builds something better but gets threatened for not following "the UNIX way".