To be fair, when you're on a UNIX-like system a program written in bash or a scripting language doesn't look any different from a compiled C binary from the end

To be fair, when you're on a UNIX-like system a program written in bash or a scripting language doesn't look any different from a compiled C binary from the endpoint of the user - shebang lines and the execute bit were a honking great idea. The whole issue with creating a "real EXE" was it was incredibly obvious when your program WASN'T an EXE on DOS and still to this day on Windows, to this day it still irks me when I download something and there's a .bat file to launch it - but I could care less if there's some wrapper shell script on Linux.