Recommending rsync as a more 'modern' replacement for SCP made me smile. Rsync is .. idosyncratic and documented by a single codebase (not withstanding the fine work OpenBSD people have done writing their own rsync)
I also find the --include --exclude behaviour very confusing. does --include=* outweigh --exclude=thing and vice-versa and does this reset left to right?
Any file copying program which is unable to make identical copies is garbage in my opinion.
The Linux tmpfs file system is another bad example. Like scp, which can silently lose information, copying a file to a tmpfs directory, then again to a decent file system can lose file metadata.