There's real value in 'one-liners', though. A 'one-liner' represents a single pipeline; a single sequence of transformations on a stream of data— a single uninterrupted train of thought.

Chopping a script into a series of one-liners where every command in the pipeline but the first and/or last operate only on stdin and stdout, as far as is reasonable to do, is a great way to essentially write shell in an almost 'functional' style. It makes it easy to write scripts with minimal control flow and easy-to-locate effects.

Such scripts are ime generally much easier to read than most Python code, but I don't find Python especially easy to read.