I really hate bash because of its unreadable syntax, and this does not help it in any way.

We have some large bash scripts in my company, ~10,000 LOC spread across multiple files, all sourcing each other and what not. It is truly hard to read bash, which means it is truly hard to maintain bash, which means that when the one person knowing the bash scripts in your company goes away, you're in for some "fun".

My point is, these quirks are not useful, except for some bash enthusiasts.