Yeah, it has. I think they started out as loving the concepts of PowerShell but hating the implementation, combined with the fact that PowerShell is clearly a Windows-first shell and doesn't work so well on other OSes (it surprised me a lot to find out that PowerShell even has support for linux).
nu tries to implement these concepts in a way that's more universal and can work equally well on Linux, macOS or Windows.
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).
nu 's commands also work on JSON, so you don't really need jq (or xq or yq) any more. It offers a unified set of commands that'll work on almost any kind of structured data.
Check out carapace. It takes a bit of setup but basically tries to make all the completions work in almost any shell. For me that solved the big step backwards from fish's completions that nu's native completions have.