Check out Tcl! It's built around strings, with a command syntax similar to shell. The standard library "exec" command allows launching programs including pipes and redirects. Although it's a bit clunky (e.g. there's no way to quote a '|' or '>' argument)
Is tcl still mainstream? And what's the dependency install like on a standard system?
I used tcl 15 years ago and it was pretty great, but the SDKs were already getting old and many falling unmaintained. I worried about the future of tcl
On Fedora, I think it might even come installed by default (possibly as a dependency of Python's Tkinter module). There's also Jim Tcl, an embeddable implementation with very few dependencies.
https://www.tcl-lang.org/man/tcl/TclCmd/exec.htm