You've some hesitation with Perl, but if you stick at it, you'll find what you seek. It feels very 'unixy' and can achieve much the same as shell while being more consistent in its syntax. Its portability means it will work the same across environments. Plus the newest editions have niceties like modern classes and try/catch as inbuilt language features.
Sharing this because its the route I went, anything I'd have written in Bash I'd now do in Perl.
Thank you for encouraging me to use Perl. After Perl 6 came out I got confused at what and how to use and hence I’ve abandoned that path. I’ll try once more now.
The tooling around Perl has also gotten better over the last decade or so while also allowing you to pack everything to run on even ancient machines running old Perl 5.
Sharing this because its the route I went, anything I'd have written in Bash I'd now do in Perl.