As an aside I once found out you can replace 'sort | uniq' entirely with an obscure awk command so long as you don't require the output to be sorted. Iirc it performs twice as fast.

  cat file.txt | awk '!x[$0]++'

The awk commands prints the first occurrence of each line in the order they are found in the file. I can imagine that sometimes that might be even better than sorted order.

sort has a -u option on my linux... ------ -u, --unique with -c, check for strict ordering; without -c, output only the first of an equal run

If you're already in Windows land, you should consider leveraging PowerShell instead of bash. Pretty much all the same tooling is there, only with more descriptive names, tab completion on everything, passes typed object data instead of text parsing, etc.

Ahem... what is powershell core? (I take exception to your if condition). As someone on Arch- I enjoy it a lot.

Bash with Notepad++ and Excel? Do you use Wine or WSL?

It's kind of mandatory to use Windows in certain envs.