I'm speaking as a non-user of powershell here, but I recently heard that you can't do text redirection. Is this true? Is there another workflow that makes it not matter?
It absolutely can do text redirection, but also lots of other stuff. I'm more into functional programming in general, but the object-oriented stuff in Powershell is really well suited for the use case. Honestly in a lot of ways Powershell just solves shell scripting, almost any task can be accomplished by stringing a handful of separate modules together, just like bash is supposed to be.
Where did you get that idea from? It can do text, as well as various objects.
Perhaps I called it the wrong thing, but the simple > and < actions are what it was about, I believe. The friend complaining remarked that cmd could do what they wanted, but not powershell. This person is used to bash on unix-like systems.