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This is akin to saying if you want to hang a picture in your house, you shouldn't just grab a hammer and a nail, instead, you should get a nice piece of wood, and a nice hunk of metal, go to the workshop, fire up the forge, the mill and various wood and metal working machines, and forge a special picture-hanging-hammerer-thing.

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Umm, no, chaining together 5 or more somewhat arcane single-purpose tools is the unrealistic solution here.

If the article was about using ls to just list files, and I had said "actually you should use Python's os.listdir() and filter the results by whatever" you would be right.

For most simple problems it's correct to use a simple tool. For the overwhelming majority of complex problems you should use a well-understood, well-designed, common general-purpose tool.

What's supposed to be the difference between chaining simple UNIX commands and chaining simple python functions again?

For example, the latter is testable.

How many executables do the two methods require? Do all those executables/programs share a common type system?

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