I completely agree.

This is the approach that I took with murex. It comes with a stack of builtins for json, jsonlines, yaml, toml, csv, sqlite3, and others. So you have all the power of data types and intelligent management of structured data but also works with regular POSIX CLI commands without any additional boilerplate code when swapping between murex code and coreutils (et al). So one could say I’ve spent a fair amount of time studying this point you’ve raised :)