Many of the comments in this thread seem to be sucked into a false dichotomy. There are better options than _either_ Rust or Bash for writing complicated shell scripts. Perl/Python are more suited to the task than either. The challenge of deciding what degree of complexity warrants the investment of more complicated language is a design decision left to the developer to figure out.
Any thought given to designing more resilient software is a good thing, but I can't help thinking that expecting any real degree of safety and security from bash is expecting too much. I don't work in devOps mind you, but whenever I have to write scripts that do anything more dangerous than creating files I leave bash on the shelf.
My experience is that going from bash to something without a compiler has an overhead that rarely pays off. mypy or TS can probably do the job well, but at that point Rust gives you a better deployment story.
Don't get me wrong, I'm absolutely an advocate for statically typed languages.
Most of the work I'm doing with bash scripts involves command invocation, piping, and filesystem I/O. Which are things that I've never seen compiled, statically typed languages do particularly better than Perl/Python. I've never done this kind of programming in Rust, but my experience with Rust suggests to me that it's not any easier or more robust to do this work in Rust than it is in Java or C++. Mind you, you might have a completely different experience depending on the task at hand.
