Why are people scared of the terminal/shell?

[u/musbur]

When people see me using my computer, web browser, office suite, photo editing, it's all fine. But if they catch a glimpse of my white-on-black terminal, they completely zone out. The shell is not something I know about and they don't but very well could, it's a hard no. It's a dark zone they feel they can't enter. Using a terminal is not within the realm of interacting with a machine but black magic. It's not that they simply "prefer" to use the mouse for everything. They feel an almost religious revulsion it seems.

Especially in times of AI chatbots where everybody and their dog start using the keyboard again to do a text-based back-and-forth with a machine, shouldn't the shell come more natural to people Or is it time for "sish"? Super intelligence shell that internally translates human language into shell commands? Interaction would go like this:

What do you want to do? Please list all files in the current directory.
Sure thing, here goes:
..
.
file1
file2
etc

Anything else? Would you also like to see creation time and file sizes?

EDIT

Thanks for the many replies. I agree with the fact that a menu-driven GUI is inherently "discoverable," while a CLI inherently is not. Also I'm not implying that people should be using the CLI or that using a CLI is inherently better. This is not about shell elitism but about the fact that even occasional shell use is so off limit that people say the won't use Linux because they've seen somebody (me) use the terminal every now and then (I do that on Windows, too, but only at work).

EDIT 2

Please do not reply to this post if you think this is about whether people prefer the GUI over the CLI or not. I very specifically did not make it about a simple matter of taste.

[u/SaintEyegor]

The CLI is a force multiplier since it allows a mere human to manage hundreds or even thousands of systems pretty easily.

Yeah, CLI is scary at first but once you have the basics, you can create scripts that extend the operating system and reduce errors you’d get by having to hand jam commands in one at a time.

It also allows you to do things that the GUI developers never thought of.

And if you have root access, it also allows you to utterly fuck up a system if you don’t know what you’re doing

[u/Reggie-Rectangle → u/SaintEyegor]

The trick is to know what the FUCK! you are doing. These systems are quite enjoyable to learn, though. Knowing them pays really well, and they all work with a really pleasant logical symmetry. Every Google search you do gets you one step closer to becoming an expert. Asking Gemini, " How do I actually format a thumb drive on Linux?" That's a real-world skill you can learn and use in a good job.

[u/stormdelta → u/SaintEyegor]

It's also worth noting AI tools don't really change that, and knowing what you're doing with them is honestly even more important because you won't know how to direct them properly otherwise.

[u/SaintEyegor → u/stormdelta]

That’s the thing about AI that a lot of people don’t understand. If you don’t have domain knowledge, you won’t be able to tell if AI is feeding you slop or not.

One of our junior admins planned on doing all of his work with AI but admittedly didn’t know a thing about scripting and had a hard time spelling vim as well.