I like the term "Load-bearing shell scripts." If it starts getting past 20 lines and you're using it for CI/deployment/tests/etc. you should replace bash/sh/zsh with something else.

Why the Python hate? Python3 is pretty stable, and even has type hinting. Virtual environments and uv are your friends. Although at that point it's no longer a simple shell script, but if you really don't want to use a venv, almost every linux distro has the major libraries you need (requests and such) in the package manager.