It is a productivity thing. CLI tools have consistent interfaces and once you are familiar with the common tools and workflow, it is considerably faster to do what you are looking to do. One particular trait that has personally made my workflow a lot faster is being able to repeat a command from history (by pressing Ctrl-R) and then writing only part of the command to run it. It saves a lot of time and makes it less cumbersome to type in very long commands.

Now to contrast this with GUIs, even the simplest things would require me to jump through menus, type some stuff, etc. Everything in the command line is precise and repetitive steps are easy to replicate.

Piping is another aspect that the command line enables, which basically feeds to output of one command into another. One common example of this is to look at lines of a log file that contain a certain set of words: `cat log.txt | grep "[ERROR]"`.

But perhaps the strongest selling point of working in the command line is consistency among tools. If you want to be productive as a developer, use of various tools for doing various tasks is common. Using the CLI for all these tools keep everything a few commands away, even interoperability is enabled seamlessly due to piping and consistency.

So yes, there is a fairly steep learning curve, but in my opinion learning how to use CLI tools over GUI is well-worth the hassle.