> Why cant we just pull that script out into a command line tool and then devs can use it to their liking, pipe its output to a folder, cat that file to soemthing else, call another tool to minify the results, move all the contents to the dist folder.

I guess because everyone needs to do those steps, so why not have a single command that does it for you. Sure, you could write your own and have everyone maintain thousands of different random shell scripts all eventually doing the same thing, but why?