Fwiw I wouldn't consider something like irssi / weechat "simple", especially if it's doing something like drawing a ui. Something like curl, jq, awk, grep, sed etc would be useful to have on Windows and should be more compatible from the shell standpoint. Not sure where they're at in terms of xterm compatibility or similar but I'm guessing that's further down the line.

Have you tried msys2/ming? Cmder.exe? Pretty good stuff if you're looking for a close Linux command line experience on Windows.