They are "integral" only because shell is lacking those functions.
On some places tools are not there (docker image for example).
Some people complain about size of the dotNet runtime, but if you install all those tools bash "needs" for comfy usage, you can equally easy install dotNet.
I don't think that's right. unix users care a lot about streams of bytes as exchange format, powershell tried the object stream way, to avoid parsing manually stuff every time and also share some common bits (table formatting for free, map/filter for free too)
unix give you partial stuff for that like comm but it's just brittle
