If you have a hacker’s soul, an old Kindle, a jailbreak, and a Python installation, anything becomes possible. I’m working on something like that (though I hadn’t thought about markdown!). The Kindle is a particularly fun device once it’s hacked!
I remember the same kind of annoyances already in 2009 with Windows (Vista!). It's one of the reasons that made me switch to Mac without any regret. Nothing seems to have changed in 15 years.
For me, the problem with shell scripting is that I do it only occasionally. I’ve always been tempted by higher-level languages. The arrival of tools like ChatGPT has made me much more comfortable writing scripts of intermediate complexity. I find shell scripting more interesting now.
I still remember working briefly in 2008 with a thing called Magic (now uniPaas I think)
XML all way down. Even the code : each line was a XML .
You were supposed to code with a weird GUI. Still have nightmares
Pretty ironicly, Terms of use warn to be very careful when downloading files with an exe.,. Vbs,. Lnk,. Bat,. Sys, or a suffix com., Because these files may contain a virus or spyware !