Freestnet or others, what‘s up with people getting excited about alternative shells?

Well, if you've been using shells for years, and still have to look up the syntax for … let's say if/while statements … every time you need to create a bash script, there appears to be a problem.

Haha, I usually don‘t use this on purpose, so fair point. But I also think that sometimes the interfaces for CLI tools are all too scattered and inconsistent, and some tools are plain bad too, or overly complicated. For example I‘ve not found a consistent pattern for piping stuff, with lines too, and some of the really important tools like sed are hard to use etc.

Actually before GPT, I used to maintain this list of useful commands: https://github.com/TimDaub/commands

Now that we have ChatGPT though, I hardly ever struggle to use bash etc

True, so what we are basically waiting for is a shell with built-in model and data-orientation (like nushell). Whether the result will be called a shell or an agent is probably more an indicator of its conversational mode.