No, it is terrible. The entire reason things like Fish annd PowerShell exist is because bash (and POSIX sh language broadly) are garbage even for their original purpose. Maybe it had to be that way because we didn’t know any better or needed to preserve historical semantics. But that doesn’t make it good.
Word splitting. Pipefail. Quoting hell. Scoping. On-error-resume-next by default. Returning values implemented like errno. Perlish cryptic tenseness around basic string manipulation/arrays. Magic global variables that don’t behave like other variables. Argument unpacking and shift.
These are bad language features, and people trip over them constantly. Even when they’re only using bash as an interactive shell or a <10 line snippet runner.
And what would you recommend for a system automation script 20 years ago, when I was 13 and discovered Linux for the first time?
Perl comes close and it's one of my favourite languages. Even back then it was archaic.
Maybe we can agree on Tcl.