It’s not a popular choice for it, but PHP is also fantastic for the sort of things described in this article. A relatively recent version is pre-installed on many *nixes, it has a decent enough (and gradual) type system, and standard library absolutely chock full of functionality (albeit very self-inconsistent in naming and structure) for dealing with files, JSON, making network requests, etc.
And because it’s not compiled, you can just whack a hashbang at the top of the file and chmod it to be executable.
I agree it'll work, but from a broader ecosystem perspective it feels like a mismatch, given PHP's historic focus on webstack stuff, and the projected likelihood that someone maintaining the system will know PHP versus Python etc.
But perhaps we can both agree that it shouldn't be in JS/Node. :p
And because it’s not compiled, you can just whack a hashbang at the top of the file and chmod it to be executable.