(In zsh's case, i think that's partly the project's own fault; it has very underwhelming defaults and a very overwhelming set-up process for new users.)
A lot of people seem to complain about loosing the ability to write scripts that work on other shells because Fish breaks compatibility.
Well, I’ve been using fish for a couple of years now and besides a couple of things that are very specific to my main computer, the rest of my scripts I build as POSIX as I can. I keep everything on a repo and I can then push/pull things on new machines and have everything available.
One can still execute a `/bin/sh script.sh`. Nothing prevents someone from doing that.
More seriously: it’s hard to put together a list like this because so many things are subjective. Maybe you prefer fish because it gets rid of some of the dumb things required for a POSIX-compatible shell, but I prefer zsh because it has every feature and the kitchen sink. I don’t know, and neither does the person putting together the list.
For example, I didn't realize "smart" in the list's vernacular means "deprecates dumb legacy behaviour". Your post is the first time that became obvious to me. Now to figure out what that behaviour is and why I should care and if it impacts performance and and and...
My post wasn't asking the curator to make decisions for me, it was asking them to help me make decisions.
And with the ~20 zsh "frameworks" and "plugin managers" here, they could really do some comparison, or probably even remove a couple.
I'd rather they showed me 3 good options and explained the trade-off than 20 options with little commentary (the lines seem to be mostly cribbed from the projects themselves).
Not the OP.
There’s probably better alternatives, but I’d have to summon the energy to tunnel my way over the barrier.
For example, I use ZSH. Should I switch to fish? The list suggests I'd be sacrificing power and the ability to write scripts but gaining, uh, intelligence and user-friendliness? Is that true?
Then there's a ton of stuff about customizing ZSH. I know that oh-my-zsh is the most popular but I did not find it especially performant so I never really looked in to using modular components of it. Now I know there are 50 other guides I could read? Maybe I want a plugin manager. antigen is a plugin manager, maybe it'll be more performant than oh-my-zsh? But what about antibody, which is "faster" and "simpler"? But zgen is "lightweight". Are weight and speed connected? What about weight and simplicity? Maybe I should switch to pure, which is "pretty, minimal, and fast".
Then I moved on to my terminal. Currently I use iTerm 2, which "does amazing things". But maybe I should switch to Terminator, which is the "future of terminals". Or MacTerm, which is "powerful". Or Alacritty, which is GPU accelerated? (Isn't iTerm 2? I don't know?)
I went to macOS package managers. I use homebrew because it's what every webpage for everything I want to install says. Should I get fink instead? Macport, I think is old, but it "simplifies the installation of software". I thought homebrew was pretty simple, but I guess it could be simpler?
Then for text editors, I've never been good at emacs-fu, so I often use nano. Maybe I should replace with micro, which is "modern and intuitive"? Or jed, which is "freely available". I don't think I paid for nano, maybe I did.
How does a curated list of Terminal frameworks, plugins, and resources differ from an uncurated one? Can the author give some example of a framework, plugin, or resource that was considered but not included because of the curation? I suspect the things that I know aren't included simply weren't considered to begin with. Maybe I'm wrong.
Most of this criticism applies to every awesome list that gets linked, of course.