You learn to really appreciate POSIX implementations when you do things like grep and pipe results over 100GB+ text files. and no, these text files were not created due to unix philosophy, I’m talking about xml generated in Java as an example. grep&co are a godsend trying to tackle these without ripping out every hair on your body.
I wouldn't entirely disagree with that statement.
> Unix style shells the implementation is excellent but the idea is mediocre.
This I would. The idea was a really good one... in the 70s. It has utterly failed to evolve since then. The implementation is actually pretty horrible. If you don't have a lot of familiarity with it it is undiscoverable, full of footguns, and consistency is an afterthought.