For the things shell is good at (running other commands, pipes, and shuffling files), I have yet to find anything even close to as good.

Unfortunately half of its badness isn't isn't the shell itself, but the convention of how parameters are passed to processes on Unix systems.

The widwit answer: "Dont do X" (and nothing more)

The enlightened answer "You should use A, B or C for these reasons"

Even though bash is installed on many systems, I try to encourage people to use better designed shells that have less of these footguns :

Fish (https://fishshell.com/): No implicit word splitting : spaces in variables won't unexpectedly become separate arguments.

Zsh (I use this: https://ohmyz.sh/): Arrays start at 1 by default, but crucially, unquoted variables don't implicitly split into multiple arguments.

Nushell (https://www.nushell.sh/): Passes structured tables and records between commands : avoids fragile parsing of text with awk/grep.