shell is ultra fast, and it's very easy to squeeze performance out of shell programs. Like I wrote, shell is a well understood programming language - it's been around for almost 50 years and generations and generations have grown up on it professionally.

You are just assuming. Try benchmarking shellscript and compare to python with same functionality and then come back.

I am not assuming, I do this daily so I know what I'm writing about. And as if that were not enough, I have formal education in shell programming as part of my degree.

Hah. Like the time you tried to tell people that grep -r was not real unix, and that they should use the vastly slower combination of find + xargs + grep?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20633546

You are the embodiment of the Dunning–Kruger effect.

grep -r is GNU bullshit which implements a filesystem find inside of grep. That's completely retarded.

Don't you have that Kubernetes-Docker trash fire to babysit, instead of trolling around here?

To be fair, the startup speed of the shell is generally considered pretty slow/expensive in comparison to running everything in a single shell/executable.

That's only a problem in real life if you're running SmartOS's pkgsrc build farm. And even then, there are techniques: Johnatan Perkin described them in length on his blog. Search for it.