The Unix tools don't work on guis. Piping between applications on the command line is still faster and simpler to hack together than a real solution. I don't feel the need for anything more because the desktop is pretty much dead and so are the metaphors it used. We might as well be complaint that the devs today aren't designing a touch based interface to get real work done on a phone. Me and my Bluetooth keyboard on termux are doing well enough thank you very much.
This is more of an accident of history, there's no reason you can't have pipe friendly collection of graphical tools, dmenu is one simple example: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Dmenu
Who are you addressing this to, end-users or UI designers? The debate seemed to start off asking "why do people prefer text UIs" and now seems to have morphed into "why don't OS vendors innovate in text UIs more".
I don't know the answer to that, but it's not really relevant to the initial debate; text UIs, for all their lack of innovation, are still dramatically better than GUIs for many use cases, which is why I use them.
I do not want to go off and spend years designing and implementing the theoretically perfect OS and toolchain before I can do other work, I just want to use the best of what exists today.
My original comment was targeted to both users and developers, but obviously the "make better tools" is only targeted to the subset that can make those better tools.
Other than using json there's nothing to improve on for the type of work I do. With jq and a few self written small programs in C I get on par performance with 'better' tools that have teams of hundreds working on them.
