I think what the OP is getting at is that the people writing the other command line tools didn't have to write that logic (and thankfully we can instead centralize it in a limited set of tools like sed and awk)

I may be mistaken, but I assumed that they meant that no parsing needed to be done between components, and that they just stream together, which is not really the case. You often have to use sed and awk (eleborate parsers) between different components to get the necessary portions of data from one component into the other...they don't just fit together like legos.

Yeah but sed and awk are amazing “sharp tools” for this sort of task: they have a learning curve, but 100 characters of awk can do some amazing stuff.

There's some truth to that, although there's still something to be said for a lack of recursive structure. Regular expressions can only match a flat pattern. Working with a JSON expression, even if you already have a JSON parser on hand, is often going to add more complexity than parsing a flat line of raw text using a regular expression.