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The reason is to have a standard shell that is there on every OS.

Not everything is servers and containers.

How many non-server machines do you find yourself regularly needing a shell on where downloading it isn't an option? Why does it need to be pre-installed?

Why is there a standard shell in POSIX? Because it is such a fundamental dependency, it saves a lot of trouble if it can be relied upon.

On the other hand reliance on bash-specific features is a net negative for GNU/linux.

The most used shell in *nix land is bash, but bash is significantly bigger than POSIX. This in practice means that many shell scripts are more bash-compliant than POSIX compliant.

It is part of the reason why it was good news when ubuntu/debian decided to transition to dash.

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