Why does it have to be bash+python? I'm finding myself using node.js scripts glued together by bash ones these days unless I'm working on a lot of data. Doing that means you can work with json natively.
Not going to outright say that node.js scripts are the worst thing ever (they're not), but out-of-the-box Python is totally underrated (except on MacOS where `urllib` fails with some opaque errors untill you run some random script to deal with certs)
JSON.parse(<data>).foo?.[0]?.bar
import json
data = json.loads('<data>')
bar = None
if foo:=data.get('foo'):
bar = foo[0].bar
print(bar)
Even with that bias though, I have to admit that it's awful for typical command line script stuff.
Dealing with async and streams and stuff for parsing csv files is miserable (I just wrote some stuff to parse and process hundreds of gigs of files in node, and it wasn't fun).
Python is the right tool for that job IMHO.
Also, weirdly, maybe golang? I just came across this [1] and it has one of my eyebrows cocked.