I totally agree with you.

> the goodness of language for long code is inversely proportional to how nice it is for shell one-liners

Well, except for this bit. Oil or fish and awk are perfectly fine for one liners but don't repeat the mistakes of posix shell syntax.

Stupidly terse code is fun and a good laugh to show to people as a puzzle… it is the opposite in an application that relies on it.