Simplicity doesn't always mean stupidity. The simple but functional shell that correctly handles whitespaces without much hassle was already available since 90s

Simplicity doesn't always mean stupidity. The simple but functional shell that correctly handles whitespaces without much hassle was already available since 90s, namely rc which is also found in Plan 9. Adopting rc's string concatenator `^` in POSIXy shells shouldn't be too hard.