Yes indeed, it sure was. I realize that. Don't forgot those awesome Amiga workstations
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga#/media/File:Amiga500_sys...
Way ahead of their time, those guys.
I don't think my point glosses over this at all though, in that the mindset back then derived from the pioneering work done at Xerox Labs & on original Unix. I know bash itself was not created as the first shell implementation, however its syntax is clearly heavily derived from the original Bourne shell and ascribed to its overall philosophy: do one thing, and do one thing well. Besides, at that time, you either dropped into Smalltalk or C if you needed to do more than text processing, which is what bash et. al. are still insanely good for.
The Bourne Again shell was created in 1989.
That said, the 1980s Unix mindset was not what you clearly think it to be. It was full of Sun workstations, NextStep, Orthodox File Manager clones, Terminals with graphics, GNU Screen, Threaded ReadNews, ...