They are not "platitudes" though, but real-world practical concerns.
To give a specific example, even with these extensions you won't be able to handle NULL bytes in your shell script. So if you ever want to store, say, a PNG image in a variable you're screwed.
This can be a real problem. I once wrote a shell script to deal with some email data, which worked brilliant right up to the point we had to deal with emails which contained attachments that aren't base64-encoded (an external provider sent it to us that way), at which point it all came crashing down. It took me ages to discover why emails were being mangled and had to rewrite the entire stuff in Python.
It was only used in our development environment and not production, so no permanent damage. But still a waste of my time.
There are many other cases where you may want to deal with binary data.
What you just said is a great observation, but it's not what I was criticizing. I was criticizing people who say "Bash is bad, so I hate this new thing." But since this is a project to build something good on top of Bash, that doesn't really address the issue.
What you're (very helpfully) pointing out is that is a case where it's just a bandaid, and Bash's flaws shine through. I suspect there will be more. But other comments are just saying "Bash bad", and those are irrelevant.
To give a specific example, even with these extensions you won't be able to handle NULL bytes in your shell script. So if you ever want to store, say, a PNG image in a variable you're screwed.
This can be a real problem. I once wrote a shell script to deal with some email data, which worked brilliant right up to the point we had to deal with emails which contained attachments that aren't base64-encoded (an external provider sent it to us that way), at which point it all came crashing down. It took me ages to discover why emails were being mangled and had to rewrite the entire stuff in Python.
It was only used in our development environment and not production, so no permanent damage. But still a waste of my time.
There are many other cases where you may want to deal with binary data.