It's also both a larger download and slower to start than Java, which is not known for being light and nimble. In fact, PowerShell is so slow that you can both compile and run the equivalent C# program before PowerShell finishes launching. Not ideal for a shell or a scripting language.

Also, the newer versions aren't included with Windows, which would have been useful – instead Windows includes an incompatible older version that admonishes you to download the new version. But why would you download several hundred megabytes of pwsh when you can equally well download any other language runtime?

Also, it sends "telemetry" to Microsoft by default.

Also, the error handling is just awful, silencing errors by default, requiring several different incantations to fix.

Also, the documentation is vague and useless. And the syntax is ugly.

It gets faster to boot on subsequent launches and some distros are now packaging pre-baked versions.

The new versions aren't included in Windows and the old versions are still in Windows for the exact same reasons of Windows backwards compatibility requirements. But at this point the bootstrap on Windows is as easy as `winget install --id Microsoft.PowerShell`.

The error handling isn't far from the bash defaults, but the magic incantations actually tell you what they do versus the number of bash scripts littered with `set -euxo pipefail` is the exact same as the number of scripts that need an `$ErrorActionPreference = "Stop"` and/or a `$PSNativeCommandUseErrorActionPreference = true`.

I find the documentation less vague and more useful than the average `man` page and the syntax is fine (and better than bash) to me, but I understand how much of that is personal preference and familiarity.