Modern unix gives you mostly low-level mechanisms, not inter-application protocols. It is better to leave it up to applications/administrators to figure out the best protocol (policy) for their use case, to make the best use of those mechanisms.

Those mechanisms aren't textual, they are byte-sequence based.

It turns out that many text-based protocols are more popular than binary/object alternatives. The penalty for textual redundancy is negligible/acceptable for many of them. Where not, Unix allows people to use unix/create new mechanisms to implement specialized protocols (rpc, protobuffers,...).