It seems to me that theoretically the effect is brutal. Practically, it’s negligible.
We pipe everyday, all day, and the world carries on, so that’s a pragmatic vote of confidence for pipes.
Are you trying to get me to write a “worse is better” essay that ends with “...and the existence and continued durability of shell scripts is proof enough that their place is not only justified, it’s vital!”, because it won’t work. Pipes are good. Shell scripts should be looked at suspiciously if they’re more than 20 lines long.
Pipes aren't even something shell scripts have a monopoly on. They're just as easy to use in Perl. Perl may not be known for its readability, but it still ends up miles ahead of an equivalent script in bash.
I do wish there was a first class syntax for it in Python (but you can get most of the way there by using generator/coroutine pipelines).
How does the existence or lack of a standard data interchange format affect the value of those pipes?