I prefer Python for this because more OSes ship with it, it has a fairly rich standard library, and SREs are more comfortable with it, so you're more likely to find others using it as glue.
It's pre-installed on a lot of systems, backwards compatibility is good, and despite the inconsistencies, the standard lib can do a lot of stuff.
https://gist.github.com/tored/b500eb7c10fbabbe2043126e51caf2...
It would be nice to have something like this more integrated within the shell or maybe composer itself.
I mean nodejs =/= javascript, the problem is nodejs and some of the people who designed it who basically made it so that it would rely heavily on NPM, a commercial solution, thanks to the virtually non existing standard library. Now Microsoft virtually owns Nodejs since it owns NPM. Nodejs creator himself regretted this decision, publicly.
Sure, doing things like http directly with node is a bit cumbersome and having a library that does some abstraction comes in handy if you're working on something that goes way beyond what you'd ever consider doing in bash. But especially for that very purpose of things where I used nodeJS instead of using bash, nodeJS always had everything I needed out-of-the-box, almost never required any dependencies.
That being said, if you re-use code, plan to share scripts etc. with other people and all these things - using something like typescript (and possibly some testing-libraries) comes in very handy for maintainability, and there you can't get around npm. But for one-off-"plubming-scripts", nodeJS had all I ever needed.