While the "everything assumes unstructured text; destructure and restructure at will" paradigm is still incredibly powerful, and set the bar super high for data interoperability and uniformity, I think it lowered expectations for [meta]data complexity that could be supported by simple, small programs.

In Windows, PowerShell is a very good example of a low-ish-level (composable commandline apps and snippets) programming environment that isn't shackled by that paradigm.