This kind of things can be found in any OS, especially widespread ones, which take their roots from long ago. We now would have enough experience to make things with fewer gotchas, but this would break compatibility and habits, and we can't get rid of the huge existing ecosystem anyway.
In the shell area, there are attempts to fix the syntax, like fish [1]. I'm afraid this kind of things is doomed to remain niche, because when you deeply understand what it is trying to do, you are also probably used to classic POSIX shell enough that you may not want to change. Fish users also need to go back to bash or zsh to follow a number of tutorials and documentations, so even them can't avoid POSIX shells.
I myself adopted zsh to have the features of fish and keep the bash-like syntax since I need to deal with this syntax either way.
In the Windows world, and actually Unix too, there is also Powershell. Can't comment that much since I don't know it, but it does not seem to have taken off on Unix, and many people on Windows seem to use bash through WSL anyway.
My conclusion is that bash and bash-like shells are ruling the world, even on Windows, and we are stuck with the POSIX shell syntax for now and probably a long time.
In the shell area, there are attempts to fix the syntax, like fish [1]. I'm afraid this kind of things is doomed to remain niche, because when you deeply understand what it is trying to do, you are also probably used to classic POSIX shell enough that you may not want to change. Fish users also need to go back to bash or zsh to follow a number of tutorials and documentations, so even them can't avoid POSIX shells.
I myself adopted zsh to have the features of fish and keep the bash-like syntax since I need to deal with this syntax either way.
In the Windows world, and actually Unix too, there is also Powershell. Can't comment that much since I don't know it, but it does not seem to have taken off on Unix, and many people on Windows seem to use bash through WSL anyway.
My conclusion is that bash and bash-like shells are ruling the world, even on Windows, and we are stuck with the POSIX shell syntax for now and probably a long time.
[1] https://fishshell.com/