Unix has produced a bunch of composable tools that have stood the test of time - find, grep, sort, uniq, wc, sed, awk etc. - decades of reusability and composability, things I reuse and compose to this day. I can't honestly say that about any other computing tool I use.

I think there may be better role models but I have a hard time finding ones that are jargon-free (to a degree, "pipes" and other terms are jargon but generally accessible to people who work with Linux), approachable, and functional for people that do not have the mental model.

It's not great -- but it is a good example because nearly everything else in wide use is far worse.