Powershell feels a lot like Microsoft wanted to appeal to *nix users, especially system administrators, without really understanding them, presumably because D̶a̶v̶e̶ ̶C̶u̶t̶l̶e̶r̶ ̶s̶h̶o̶t̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶m̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶s̶i̶g̶h̶t̶ Microsoft's way of doing things was and is considerably different. As a result, it hadn't really occurred to them that much of bash's weirdness and flakiness is historical, not simply because *nix users prefer it that way.

The end result was still a much better language than bash, of course, but that's a very low bar.

It was actually inspired by Perl as much as Bash if you read one of the asides in the O'Reilly book written by one of PS's developers lol.