I understand you but bat, exa, etc.. have a huge downside. I have to change many platforms and systems at work and I can't be bothered to install all those new utilities in every new system.
cat, ls, etc.. just work, bat has to be installed, and I have a pretty high threshold for a utility to be so vital for me that I absolutely have to install it in every Unix box I work.
I started to keep an Ansible playbook to setup everything for me. Basically, it replaces most of the core utils with modern alternatives like like cat -> bat, grep -> ripgrep, top -> htop, and so on.
That way, I don't have manually install everything for new systems or when I'm doing a clean install on one of my existing systems.
You might enjoy looking into nix and nixos. It’s designed to make that workflow as bulletproof as possible. One of my coworkers maintains a github repo that describes his exact system, and can create a sandbox that behaves the exact same as the one he’s used to with one command (on any machine that has nix installed).
I haven't thought about making it public because it's just a matter of using the get_url command to download the binaries into /usr/bin and then outputting a .bashrc and /etc/bash.bashrc that contains aliases for every command like "alias cat=bat".
cat, ls, etc.. just work, bat has to be installed, and I have a pretty high threshold for a utility to be so vital for me that I absolutely have to install it in every Unix box I work.