Bash-like scripting in shells is prevalent in operating systems but I don’t understand why, when it doesn’t have the syntax to make programming easy like other languages. What features does bash have that make it so suitable for shells? Why even new operating systems like Redox OS choose a very similar syntax over a completely different programming language?
Engineering is tradeoffs.
A command shell is focused on file operations and starting/stopping applications. So it makes it easy to do those things.
You can use scripting languages (e.g. Node.js/Python) to do everything bash does but they are for general purpose computing and so what and how you perform a task becomes more complicated.
This is why its important to know multiple languages, since each one will make specific tasks easier and a community forms around them as a result.
If I want to mess with the file system/configuration I will use Bash, if I want to build a website I will use Typescript, if I want to train a machine learning model I will use Python, if I am data engineering I will use Java, etc .