Or you literally just need to run a sequence of commands to create some stuff in the filesystem without doing any text processing whatsoever, which is my use ca

Or you literally just need to run a sequence of commands to create some stuff in the filesystem without doing any text processing whatsoever, which is my use case for the three or four large-ish BASH scripts I've written professionally. Make was totally inappropriate in that case because I would have had to enumerate a lot of intermediate files and would have wound up with a parallelizable series of mini-scripts that would need to run serially to work correctly. And Python would ultimately turn into a DSL that looks almost exactly like BASH because the problem domain is "run a bunch of commands in sequence" which is what BASH is designed to do.