I wish that string command and also their math command were just general-purpose utilities pre-installed on all systems.
Tried to script something with sed the other day and was so confused why my regexes weren't matching, until we realized you need to pass --regexp-extended to get modern-day regex.
And then I later tried to calculate an average, which bc decided to round down, because it was presumably doing integer math. I actually ended up running python -c "print($total / $count)", because I could not be arsed to work out, if there was some flag to make bc work properly.
I'm fine with these tools continuing to exist for legacy purposes, but I would like a modern replacement just about now.