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Structured data flows in pipes too. Json can even be line oriented. GUI programming fails when you get past a few hundred “lines” of complexity. What I’d love to see is a revolution of shells and terminals to more easily work and pull from piped data.

I hear what you're saying.

However, how can you ensure the output type of one program matches the input type of another?

Allow programs to specify the type of data they can consume and the type of the data they emit. This is how powershell does it (using the dotnet type system).

And the problem is how can you ensure the output type of one program matches the input type of another.

A program emits one type, and the other program accepts another.

Something will be needed to transform one type into another. Imagine doing that on the command line.

Cat file1 | convert | dest

Having GUIs compose programs seems antithetical to the idea of shell scripts which are often thrown together quickly to get things done. Personally, I view shell scripting as a "good enough" and if you need more structure then you change your tools.