Even good, well-founded intentions can end terribly. The mistake is doubling down on those decisions when the mistake has become obvious.
I am also in the camp that CLI tools should return objects that can be parsed (by the shell or otherwise).
Not to programmatically parse 'ls' output or some /proc/some/file.
Eg. git started as Perl scripts then moved to C to realy have data straight from C calls from system.
So for example all Internet things calling "openssl -some -options ...." are pure trash :>>