There is no need for hysteria; it depends on your use case. In the Unix shell, since every basic operation spawns a process, and performing such operations only takes a few milliseconds, startup time is extremely important. If it were written in Java, it would probably not be architected this way, but the startup time of C makes it acceptable to do so; it is an issue if commands written in languages like Perl and Python feel slower than the rest of the system.
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There is no need for hysteria; it depends on your use case. In the Unix shell, since every basic operation spawns a process, and performing such operations only takes a few milliseconds, startup time is extremely important. If it were written in Java, it would probably not be architected this way, but the startup time of C makes it acceptable to do so; it is an issue if commands written in languages like Perl and Python feel slower than the rest of the system.
>>In the Unix shell, since every basic operation spawns a process...<<
That does not seem to be the use case that's being examined.
The use case that's being examined is - "writing shell scripts / cron jobs / random commandline utilities".
"Random commandline utilities" sounds like exactly that; shell scripts use a lot of Unix commands, I don't know why cron jobs are mentioned.