I agree, you're on a *nix OS, calling a CLI tool should be a perfectly valid way to do something.
IMO the real issue is that Apple's built-in CLI tools aren't properly integrated with the rest of the system. Apple's curl used to use the same certificate store as the rest of the OS, then Apple changed it.
It was technically curl that dropped SecureTransport but I guess because no one at Apple was willing to maintain it and it apparently is a frozen API that doesn't support newer than TLS 1.2 (!). For a while their inbuilt curl could use both but preferred LibreSSL anyway.
https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2025/01/14/secure-transport-supp...
Well yeah, so not really curl's fault here.
More importantly, IIRC Apple's curl actually stopped using SecureTransport before upstream dropped it.