My understanding of the mini-slogan "everything is a file" is that it was never meant to refer to the entire API of the object, but just reading/writing data.
And then you hit ioctls, which are necessary even by the very file-like way of
working with terminals. The slogan in the unix world never matched anything
well, or at least never since '90s.
> The slogan in the unix world never matched anything well
It matched Plan 9 (which is really Unix V9) really well …