If anyone understands shell scripts, it would be people writing init scripts at Red Hat :)
Anyways, that is not anything like other programming languages. Checking in that way is error prone and not really an improvement (nor equivalent to set -o).
[[ "$DAEMON_PATH" ]] && rm -rf "$DEAMON_PATH/*"
See what I did there? It's an rm -rf /* bug because "checking variables" is
not the answer.
In other programming languages, if an identifier is mis-typed things will blow up. E.g., in ruby if I write:
daemon_path=1; if daemon_path; puts deamon_path; end
I get "NameError: undefined local variable or method `deamon_path`"
These issues do not always stem from bad developers. Bash's defaults are not safe in many ways and saying "people should just check the variable" isn't helpful here.