The poster is holding a line of bash to the standard of code and is illustrating that readability should be the goal and a way of bringing bash commands to a standard of readability for something like a PR. Readability is really there to show _intent_ I would say though that if you are bringing this to the code standards of today then this should really be wrapped up in some kind of unit test (https://github.com/sstephenson/bats )for it to pass the PR. That would make the code a bit more maintainable and can be integrated as a stage in your CI/CD pipeline.

If we do that then the intent would be clarified by the input and the expected output of the test. Then then the code would at least be maintainable and the readability problem becomes less of an issue when it comes to technical debt.

I've done this plenty of times with my teams and its certainly helped.