† The qualifying clause is probably unnecessary here.
I prefer bash/zsh/etc because of the ecosystem around them. If I wanted to throw that away and start from a different base I'd probably use Powershell or something like it to be honest.
I've gone back to bash, might try out zsh.
IMO its real benefit is in its scripting language, which is mostly a Bash superset with really nice quality-of-life features, namely a vast set of parameter expansion flags, super-advanced globbing options, native support for numerical-indexed arrays, and... it doesn't split arrays on whitespace unless you explicitly ask it to! You can freely iterate over filenames with whitespace, special characters, etc., and you technically don't need to quote any of it. A good Zsh programmer will be able to almost totally grep, awk, bc, etc., and all the overhead of spawning a subshell.
Some people are better at this kind of thing than me, but I find it hard when languages are close in notation (I never confuse C++ and python, but I confuse python/ruby, or bash/fish).
