> The heavy use of shell scripts for instance in this post here...

There's exactly one in the post. It's ten non-blank/non-comment lines, and the author says of it

  This is not well designed but it gets the job done.

My least favorite thing to see in the world is a Ruby, (worse) Python, or (much worse) Go program that could have been a very simple shell script.

When my sysadmin programs get more complicated, I reach for something more suited (like Erlang), but if the shell script is simple and only has deps on other standalone programs, then I write a shell program.