I'm not familiar with the landscape - is there a "compiles to reasonably-readable [ba]sh" language that's gotten any traction anywhere? That seems like at least an interesting possible solution.
There’s also babashka, which pretty much let’s you write clojure in your shell scripts.
Even the project names: osh, and ysh, and oils, where osh is short for Oil Shell, but so is OilS I think...
It makes it really annoying and difficult to read, IMHO. Maybe it's just me.