You’re right in that writing Python using shell paradigms is awful.

Writing Python that shells out to do stuff — but using Python paradigms — isn’t so bad. Particularly if you are used to calving off your shell stuff into shell functions that run something and massage the output. In Python you end up doing something pretty similar: yield the text you want and use that as arguments to the next call to subprocess.run.

Basically “| xargs command” but nicer.