No, but they have system or the like, which is effectively the same, just being evaluated by the shell. https://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/system.3.html
Anyway, turns out that shelling out to an external binary fed with bytes from the Internet is good fun
b) It's a legacy misfeature that I hope new compiled languages don't copy. There are much much better better interfaces for running processes that don't rely on an intermediate shell.
c) Shell escaping is much more stable than some hipster language like PHP where you'd need to update your escaping for new language changes all the time.