I do find myself using wget to download things because I don't have to remember the curl option to follow redirects, and wget saves the file using the same name as the last bit of the uri.
Same goes for youtube-dl versus wget. The latter is a relatively “dumb” download tool.
Unless I'm missing something in your statement.
No it's not :)
You need to `curl -LO`. See for example github releases:
curl -LO https://github.com/S2-/gitlit/releases/download/v1.4.1/gitlit-1.4.1.tar.gz
curl -O https://github.com/S2-/gitlit/releases/download/v1.4.1/gitlit-1.4.1.tar.gz
Even better would be to use `curl -LOJ`, so if the filename is not in the url, but in the `Content-Disposition filename` http response header, curl would get the filename from there.
--Someone who built a browser on libcurl