Keyboard Maestro is a lot more powerful than what you're thinking of. A sequence of shell commands bound to hotkeys is in no way an adequate replacement.
Do you have any examples of use cases Keyboard Maestro is great for?
When building macros you can leverage OCR and image recognition so it can know how to find elements on the screen that you need it to click. I have barely scratched the surface of what it can do I am sure there is lots more.