I'll still write bash, but only if it's very trivial (~ <= 10-ish lines, no super-complex conditionals, etc). For anything else, it's worth stepping up to just about any more-robust language. If you don't like the hoops that something like Python makes you go through for basic shell-like operations, maybe try Perl? For middling-complexity scripts, perl can be a nice win over bash, without all the development overhead of Python. Perl5 is pretty much installed everywhere and universally compatible for anything but the very latest language features.
I usually resort to running inline scripts using python3 or node (using only the standard library) if I need to do something that I can't express in bash easily. That means avoiding stuff that have to look up and I won't remember or be able to debug in a month.
I like the idea of running inline scripts. This means that all the logic is in a single file so you don't have multiple files to copy around (e.g. a .sh file and a .py file).
I've done this with awk and jq, but haven't done it with node or python. But why not? It sounds like a good approach for some cases.
