Guix has never insisted on 'curl | bash'. At first there were no instructions on how to use the shell installer script (perhaps you translated to 'curl | bash'?), but now the manual explicitly recommends to wget and chmod it:

https://guix.gnu.org/manual/devel/en/guix.html#Binary-Instal...

I think you'll find that things are much more up to date nowadays. You still need root access for the guix-daemon though.