Because for what it was made to do and what I want to use it for, it’s utterly ideal. It’s easy, it’s direct, it works seamlessly with any program’s command line, and I can run anything network-wide on any linux machine on my network out of box with no fiddling around. No check for version, no missing packages to hunt up, no libraries to download and verify; I type, I save, it runs, I’m done. If I need to integrate command line tools on six separate programs and/or five to eight scripts in two languages to do a stat/resource/network check on my Linux machines, I can do them all from one script and I can do it to six separate machines over ssh in a loop in under 200 lines of code and throw the results up on a webpage in apache with another thirty if I want to make it pretty in html. Then I set it to a cron job to run once an hour and forget it for months; it keeps on keeping on, I just check that webpage to see everything is fine, in separate tabs even. And I can do all that very very very fast and literally out of box; if I add a brand new machine, all I do is copy my base bash library over and set permissions and it’s ready to go.
Those scripts will always work, on every linux machine, every time, in the same way; they will run in ubuntu, solus, fedora, arch, debian, raspberry pi, probably slackware I haven’t checked, the scripts do not care. Ones I wrote ten years ago are still running just fine.
Bash is kind of like the general of my script and cli army; she does not need to know everything herself, she just needs to organize the troops to do their jobs, and tell me if someone’s slacking off because python decided to be a dick about a package or php is being cranky or apache just won’t speak to anyone no idea wtf is going on there or otbr vanished into the ether or all my wifi drivers are in revolt after an update. She does not stress me at all; she is the finder of my stresses before the drama hits critical, and this is why she is my favorite.