A list I built once of such options for commands: https://github.com/fish-shell/fish-shell/issues/3164#issueco... You are right, very little consistency :-(

In some cases you really need the \0 delimiters for safety, but a large portion of safe scripting in shells is merely about handling arrays of strings, without joining nor splitting them on whitespace. bash does have arrays and "${array[@]}" syntax but it's pretty horrible (and needs the `shellcheck` linter to keep right). Some more modern shells e.g. `fish` do much better on this.