Powershell is very powerful and for windows it beats cygwin/mingw. Not quite sure how it measure against Linux shells running on Linux, but Microsoft has really made a proper shell for windows, too bad it looks so different.

Obviously if you work in a cross-platform environment, cygwin/mingw is still the only thing that will provide you some sort of consistency in your workflow on Windows machines.

I don't get agree with your parent, but I used cygwin when I was on Windows and it mostly does what you want if you just need basic command line tools.

The major annoyances were packages were limited, compiling anything was generally a disaster and file permissions between linux/windows are a mess. I happily used it everyday though.

I use git bash, with conemu, to be honest I don't do anything crazy but most of the linux commands I need day to day just work.