Agreed; back in the day when we/I used to play text adventures, or interact with MUDs/MOOs those systems had English-like interaction languages but the semantics of them were relatively clear -- you mostly had to follow the verb/prep/object formula and once you figured that out, you could manage the system fairly well, without running into a lot of terrible corner cases.

I'd rather have an assistant type system with a fairly well defined query system that exposed its capabilities and limitations directly, rather than me having to guess at the corner cases and failure points.

Disclaimer: I work @ Google on display assistant devices, but I don't work on the actual assistant interaction pieces.