[opinionator1]

I should have clarified. I'm not talking about micro-optimizations. Bash doesn't scale operationally. You might be a bash wizard who never fucks up, but you're never going to be able to keep non-wizards from having to use your awful bash codebase.

Bash is not at all meant for "system administration task automation", the very idea is ludicrous. It has to be the most singularly ill-purposed invention ever to be applied towards task automation.