Agreed. (MS-DOS may have “reinvented UNIX, poorly,” but there do exist other OS and other approaches to UI that enjoy a large and happy user base.)
I think the point here is that DOS explicitly rejects the composition that pipes enable, in exchange for the ability to just hand "the whole system" over to a programmer.
But the main point, that DOS was basically a thin program loader that "got out of the way" is sound. Think of it like a UEFI shell environment, with 640k+ limits.
There's been a few attempts at this, but I settled on the fish shell as it has a good balance and syntax highlighting for interactivity.
I still write simple scripts in sh and complex ones in Python however.