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You’ve never written a bash script and needed to parse, format, concat lots of strings? What about arrays of strings? All of which is easier in just about any modern language.

As a front-end dev who works with JS all the time and never writes shell scripts, every time I have to deal with shell scripts I think "I'd really rather use JS for this".

I am also a frontend dev. My experience has been completely opposite from yours. Node.js is my go-to tool for writing automation scripts.

I think these are some reasons why our mileages differ:

- I need my scripts to work in both Windows and Linux.

- I am not very experienced with bash or other shell.

- Most of my "automation work" only involves reading text from a file, transform it, and write to another file. (Generating SQL commands, doing stats about town names, etc.)