> for anything more involved than a one-liner alias kind of script, I turn to python

I agree with this. If you can trust your users to have python3 in their environment, I don't see a good reason to use sh/bash instead of python. Non-trivial shell scripts are unreadable to me, and the semantics are too different from normal programming languages.

The only scenario I can see is a script that has to call multiple commands over and over, which can be a pain in python if you're piping a lot of stuff and all that. No, piping grep to cut and sed doesn't count; you can do that in python itself.