Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that PowerShell is theoretically better since it can deal with structured data. But in practice, I could never get as efficient with it as I could with "the Unix way" (everything is a string). If I was writing a "production" script, then it's better. But when I'm just trying to quickly do something on the command line, the "everything is a string" approach is good enough.
The thing that we'd ideally want to happen, but will probably never will unless a mad person does it, would be to have something that wraps around a POSIX shell, and extends it in a sort of non-compatible way. Let's call this new tool $NEWSH. Larry Wall basically tried to do this with Perl but I guess his vision was too lax for such a pursuit, Perl tried to be everything, all at once. What I mean by this new approach…
You need the programs to make this hypothetical shell useful. That’s structuring the output of pretty much every program as data and passing it through as data conserving types. That’s arguably a very large barrier to entry.