I don’t see why the shell must be both nice to program in and a concise textual interface.
To each their own, but writing bash scripts that get more complex than moving a few files around and sucks (imho), so I don’t bother.
I attempted to demonstrate how evolving a CLI session into a script is very beneficial. That bash is not great for that purpose is exactly the point of the article. A better shell language would mean not throwing away your organic, working code for a rewrite.
Unless you're trying to say that you rarely use the command line to explore a system and operate mostly through scripts. I think I would burn a lot of time in writing boiler plate when "curl | grep" would do the job for human consumption in less than 50 keystrokes.
Because people just want to have one consistent tooling for everything, and it should be effortless available everywhere. Especially portability is a huge problem.