[10000truths]

It doesn't come with bash pre-installed, but installing it is as simple as "pkg install bash", and that is the option that everyone working with FreeBSD will choose when they encounter a shell script that only works with bash. My point is that bash is already so ubiquitous that almost no one is going to care about an extra few megabytes for the bash executable in their OS image.

[justaj]

If you're installing packages anyway, then why not just write in Python, Go, or any other languages which have relatively less footguns and have more features? I'm sure at least some of those packages are also available on FreeBSD.