Possibly the most important tip is to use ShellCheck (https://www.shellcheck.net/) as a linter on your scripts and work through the various warnings to eliminate them. For the rare times that ShellCheck is overly cautious, you can remove a specific warning with a comment before the offending line such as
# shellcheck disable=SC1091
Also, take time to look through Greg's Wiki as it is possibly the best Bash resource that discusses the various pitfalls: https://mywiki.wooledge.org/BashPitfallsAs a Bash script writer, I disagree with your "red flag" interpretation as that'll mean that you'll end up with poorly written Bash scripts along with a hotch-potch of different tools to achieve the functionality (e.g. different versions of Python required for older scripts and newer ones). Knowing Bash is also very useful for writing Dockerfiles.