I'd love to hear from someone deeply familiar with Nix and Guix about laziness.
I'm deeply familiar with Nix and I've concluded that lazy semantics is absolutely critical for a configuration language. It lets me refer to other attributes of my configuration from anywhere. For example, I can refer to port number from my whatever service in my firewall. Nix's system of overlays depends on laziness too to provide efficient late-binding familiar from OOP.
I don't need to topologically sort the evaluation of the various inter-dependencies of my configuration. So long as there exists an evaluation order, laziness finds it.
Laziness is compelling enough that I managed to convince the author of Jsonnet <https://jsonnet.org/> of it when he was designing it, and in turn he helped me design what is now known as overlays in Nix.
I don't even understand how Guix manages to work without laziness, though clearly it does somehow. I'm curious as to how that is possible, though I fear I will only ever truly understand by diving into Guix.
If you want a traditional Unix-like shell that is mostly sensible in the places where Bash is not, check out Zsh. It has a ton of complicated features, but most Bash scripts can be ported easily (if not outright copied and pasted). Zsh has fewer footguns by default than Bash, and it has more "safety" settings that you can enable.
There is also the Oil shell, whose creator often posts on HN, and which I think is meant to be a superset of Bash, but I have not used it myself and can't vouch for it.
As for the alt shells, I've was specifically interested in Elvish, but I dropped it as soon as I saw that they don't support parameter interpolation in string literals, like `"${HOME}/.local"`. This is such a common operation in shell scripts that I have no interest in a shell that doesn't support it, and I can't imagine why Elvish doesn't.