That's a good question -- and of course, the answer is it depends. Having small focused tools is great, but that's only when the substrate/platform that lets you combine them is suuuuper good/standardized/well-designed.

`cat file.txt | sort | uniq` is excellent, but I think a lot of the ergonomics of that kind of small/focused tool reusability is due to the super low friction of using pipe, and how well STDIN, STDOUT, and STDERR work behind the scenes. This kind of falls apart when you try and string together web services.

In my opinion, Gitlab's inclusion of so many parts of the process is good because it saves you from having to manage all the other tools, and it gives you answers for the complete process (where it's possible you could get painted into a corner depending on which focused tools you picked to do some pieces of the process, and have to write your own glue or go on a long search).