I do actually agree with your point about compliance. It would be really cool if we had a POSIX-conformant set of shell commands written purely in JS, as an alternative to having to find and install compiled binary ports that run on our particular non-Unix systems. At least, it's an interesting idea.
Instead whenever something like this comes up, we see a bunch of grumpy systems programmers waving their fists in the air, as if C is the only language powerful enough to manipulate basic strings in the shell. Seems a bit silly to me when you think about it.