The only real advantage of bash (or other shells) is the ability to build up to it from the command line; to use it as a REPL then embed the stuff you've just done into a script.

The massive disadvantage of bash is that it uses a legal filename character " " as a delimiter ("$IFS"). That means it's very easy to write scripts which work fine on your test case but blow up in a different context. And the worst case of that is accidentally deleting the user's file system.

So many of the cute little bash examples you'll see, including I think the awk one on this page, will go wrong if you have a space in the wrong place in your filesystem. Or, god help you, a newline. Or a file named "*". Or "--".