Is something like that possible? Seems like you could conceivablely dump these small file size tools into a temp folder and and use them and that could be automated.
Is there a security issue with that? Do any of these tools need more permission than the remote session would have?
Maybe the main issue is portability of these apps?
This is certainly a common sentiment (I've felt it myself) so is it at all possible?
The ones that leap out at me are ripgrep (a genuinely excellent recursive grepper), jq (a JSON processor - there is no alternative to this in the standard unix toolkit), and hyperfine (benchmarking).
As a greybeard linux admin, I agree with you though. This is why when someone tells me they are learning linux the first thing I tell them is to just type "info" into the terminal and read the whole thing, and that will put them ahead of 90% of admins. What I don't say is why: Because knowing what tooling is available as a built-in you can modularly script around that already has good docs is basically the linux philosophy in practice.
Of course, we remember the days where systems only had vi and not even nano was a default, but since these days we do idempotent ci/cd configs, adding a tui-editor of choice should be trivial.
What are you talking about? I'm still living those days in modern day AWS with latest EC2 machines!
I have a very limited set of additional tools I tend to install on systems, and they are in my default ansible-config, so will end up on systems quickly, but I try to keep this list short and sweet.
95% of the systems I manage are debian or ubuntu, so they will use mostly the same baseline, and I then add stuff like ack, etckeeper, vim, pv, dstat.