I love that in the end, everything still comes down to using bash (and env vars), because for all its footguns and strings, it's still the most reasonable choice when giving up on the zoo of newer formats. I expect it to outlive us all, like our unergonomic keyboards, and having to deal with null values.
I assume it will. Bash scripting has been around for a long time and isn’t going away anytime soon. It’s already outlived some folks.