I've had a few of those leak ink over a bunch of my school stuff over the years.

I think it's just not very solidly built, and in some set of circumstances (certainly not always) it's prone to making a mess.

Yes, I think Powershell is a step in the right direction. Not ideal of course, but where we should be going in general. At a minimum everything should be some sort of JSON-ish structure, if possible with support for common datatypes (strings, integers, floats, arrays, hashes, dates)

It's terrible because while it was a good idea back in the day, today everything tries to get away from it as quickly as possible. Most any tool gets wrapped in a library that actually exposes a much more pleasant to use and safer interface.

And the usage of text streams means everyone is reinventing the same wheel decade after decade, everyone in a slightly different manner and with different footguns.

That it's kind of terrible and decades out of date.

Yeah, most problems are solvable somehow, but you still have to solve them instead of getting things done, and the results are often fragile. Like awk -F: /etc/passwd works nicely, until there's an \: in there that awk completely fails to understand.

awk -F: will not recognize that

It's terrible, but the Unix philosophy leaves much to be desired. Like the example:

    cat file | grep "foo" | awk '{print $2}'

There's no end to the nonsense you have to deal with that just shouldn't even be a problem in 2025.