Exactly. Things like the "useless use of wc -l" fall into a similar category for me. When I want to count the lines of stdout, I use "wc -l". It may not be the simplest, most efficient or fewest keystrokes, but it is extremely easy to remember and fits well into the model of a pipeline of simple single-purpose tools. I tend to use cat at the beginning of pipelines just because it keeps the flow left-to-right, and makes it much clearer what the source of the data is.

There's value in knowing some of the advanced things that the textutils and bash can do together, and sometimes there's value in using those things. I don't dispute that, but I do dispute the need to shame people who use the tools in ways that you personally don't like.

Shame or not, I'm going to keep using cat at the beginning of my pipelines unless I have a really good reason not to. If that makes some people think I'm not in the Unix wizard in-group, I don't really care.