You mentioned one pain point of shell scripting, variability among platforms. The other pain point is that different tools have different methods to treat error

You mentioned one pain point of shell scripting, variability among platforms. The other pain point is that different tools have different methods to treat errors and warnings. This makes debugging shell scripts a nightmare, compare to scripting languages like python. If you need to debug your work, you need to check several levels of script vs. commands, and use different ways to check for errors depending on what is causing the problem. If I had to decide on a tool to replace shell script I would vote for tcl, since it maintains many of the advantages of the shell but provides a better handling of the programming aspect. Unfortunately these days it seems that you either use shell or some full-scale language like python.