To this day, error handling in most Unix shells just sucks. Background commands, pipes, command substitutions, functions, if/while conditions, subshells, etc. are all "special cases" when errors are involved. You can make them suck less but the more you try to handle all the possible ways things can fail, the vastly more complex your code becomes, which the Bourne lineage languages just aren't ergonomically suitable for.

I think PowerShell was totally right to call this out and do it better, even though I don't particularly love the try-catch style of exception handling. False is not an error condition, exceptions are typed, exceptions have messages, etc.

The problem with PowerShell coming from bash etc. is that the authors took one look at Unix shells and ran away screaming. So features that were in the Bourne shell since the late 1970s are missing and the syntax is drastically different for anything non-trivial. Other problems like treating everything as UTF-16 and otherwise mishandling non-PowerShell commands have gotten better though.