I have a lot of aliases, for example to start my QEMU VM with my development stuff in it, I make an alias for 'qemu-system-x86_64 [...]' with all the switches and devices and files required, called 'startvm'. I have another that takes me to my current project's folder and pulls the repo. And a third that creates a new folder called 'newproject', creates a small set of folders and empty files with specific names, and finally makes a git repo in it. I am a serial abandoner of projects so I use this more often than I care to admit.
It's not pretty, but functional; and since I always copy my dotfiles when I change computers, I've kept these small helpers with me for a while now.
For cases where you need to modify your current environment (setting environment variables, changing directories, etc), you need to run the script using the "source" built-in. That will execute the script in the current shell rather than a sub-shell.
So instead of
./some-script.sh
source some-script.sh
. some-script.sh
It’s more like “roll your own oh-my-zsh”