Indeed it is, but it's kind of a different context than a "real" programming language. What works for one doesn't necessarily work well for the other.

Truly, one of the main reasons I might stop increasing the complexity of a bash one-liner and move it to a full shell script, or bail for Python, is specifically so I can turn those chains of pipes into imperative steps with temp vars so that they're actually legible and easy to reason about. I can't imagine why I'd want to go the other direction.