OP here wrote this the most verbose way I could think possible. Most commands are pre-aliased in PowerShell and arguments are fuzzy matched as long as they're not ambiguous.

For example:

   Remove-Item $directory -Recurse -Force
   rm $directory -r -fo

For this specific example ConvertFrom-Yaml actually doesn't exist as a standard cmdlet and ConvertTo-Json isn't aliased by default:

    gc ./something.yml | ConvertFrom-Yaml | ConvertTo-Json > /some/file.json