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.