Yeah. Sh needs to be abandoned. There's a million better alternatives, including those without such an asinine syntax.

If I’m going to install a tool to run my code, why would I pick any of these alternatives instead of going straight to a “real” programming language?

Most of the value in sh to me is that it’s ubiquitous. I write a script and the runtime is already available across most devices, operating systems, containers, and everywhere else without an extra steps.

Because a shell is also REPL for interacting with command line utilities. It solves a different problem to “real programming languages”.