@gunstick @jollysea I second this view. My usual progression is: bash one-liner (mostly pipes and loops, a little bit of subshell), then a collection of these oneliners in an executable file (usually Makefiles for my own weird reasons. I'd recommend justfiles nowadays even though I don't use them yet) and then python scripts and finally python projects.
benefit of bash is: quickly run something in a lot of places, calling random simple things like bash -c "for f in $(ls .config/); do echo $f | ts; done" is powerful.
benefit of python: way more helpful to debug, way less painful mistakes, and way better handling of complex data

I learned a lot of nice tricks through the wizard zines and comics for bash: https://wizardzines.com/comics/