

I prefer this as well, but just adding that Fish also supports $() for those that don’t know.
I keep hearing people that haven’t used modern versions of Fish say that it’s somewhat different from Bash and strays from POSIX compatibility quite a bit. While the latter is true, Fish has added many bash-isms over the years, so most scripting idioms you’re familiar with will work there too.
If you’re expecting stability for any Ubuntu release, that went out the window when Canonical started forcing Snaps.
But non-LTS Ubuntu releases have always been a testing ground for less-than-stable changes. uutils is just one of them, and the only way to make them stable is to see how they’re being used in the wild.