It's arguably better as a scripting language than as an interactive shell. There are a lot of shell scripts out there that also dabble in light data processing, and it's not the easiest thing to achieve well or without corner cases. So nu scripts are great if all you need is shell scripts with some data processing.
nu as an interactive shell is great for the use cases it shines at (like OP's example), but a bit too non-POSIXy for a lot of people, especially since it's not (yet) as well polished as something like fish is for example.
Edit to add that nu's main drawback for scripting currently is that the language isn't entirely stable yet, so you better be prepared to change your scripts as required to keep up with newer nu versions (they're at 0.107 for a reason).