I was trying to understand what the lede was here, and it turns out the author assumed that PATH was something understood by the kernel, which is rather an odd

I was trying to understand what the lede was here, and it turns out the author assumed that PATH was something understood by the kernel, which is rather an odd assumption, but perhaps one that others make. I did get one thing out of this though. I had honestly wondered for the longest time why we need to call env to get the same functionality as PATH in a shebang. Ironically, thanks to either an article I read here (or on the crustacean site) recently, I already knew that the shebang is something which is parsed by the kernel, but had not put two and two together at all. Much like the author. So goes to show the benefits of exploring and thinking about seemingly "obvious" concepts.