Weird footguns don't matter if you stick to using shell for control flow, composition, and interpolation, and don't use all the weird things you have to look up every time. It's also very easy to do something in the commandline then just
tail -n 8 $HISTFILE > script.sh
> Shell is not a programming language, it's an interface to the OS, and thinking about it like a programming language is just asking for frustration.
I guess this just isn’t obvious to me. Where do you see the boundary between “interface to the os” and “programming language”?
Shell exists to give users a way to run programs. It was the user interface for UNIX, C was the programming interface. Yes, it's technically a programming language by any reasonable definition, but it's not meant to be used in the same way at all so that's not helpful.