I think you underestimate what can be done with actual code because the devops industry seems entirely code averse and seem to prefer a "infrastructure as data" paradigm instead and not even using good well tested/understood formats like sql databases or even object storage but seems to lean towards more fragile formats like yaml.
yes the possix shell is not a good language which is why thinks like perl, python and even php or C got widely used but there is a intermediate layer with tools like fabric(https://www.fabfile.org/) solving a lot of the problems with the fully homegrown without locking you into the "Infrastructure as(manually edited) Data" paradigm that only really works for problems of big scale and low complexity which is exactly the opposite of what you see in many enterprise environments.
yes the possix shell is not a good language which is why thinks like perl, python and even php or C got widely used but there is a intermediate layer with tools like fabric(https://www.fabfile.org/) solving a lot of the problems with the fully homegrown without locking you into the "Infrastructure as(manually edited) Data" paradigm that only really works for problems of big scale and low complexity which is exactly the opposite of what you see in many enterprise environments.