> I think the main reason for disabling color output is the programmatic use of the output. It is easy to remove color within pipes (c.f. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/17998978/removing-colors...), however quite cumbersome to clean the output of each potential program just to make sure nothing breaks.

Most programs that output color already disable color if the output isn't a terminal; in fact I just pipe the output to cat when I want color off.