alt Hacker NewsHm, at least build123d (which I had never heard of, thanks!) can export STEP, which I believe is becoming a necessity if one wants to assemble real-world models with FreeCAD (and nicely also slicers are picking up support to it). I'm on the edge though if I'd really like a proper DSL instead of building it on top of Python, although I can see that too has its benefits (e.g. library access).
Does anyone have idea about the STEP export support status for KCL/µcad? To me it looks like KCL cannot, and I cannot find information on it about µcad. The one tool I'm familiar within this space is OpenSCAD and it cannot. While FreeCAD is able to (sometimes?) convert from STL to STEP, it seems actually working with such models in FreeCAD is quite compute-inefficient.
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Converting from STL to STEP is essentially always a case-by-case thing.
If you import, sew, check geometry, refine, etc., you can eliminate unnecessary triangles in planar faces. But you can't magically make a 120-sided-polygon that should be a circle a circle; you're going to have to do that yourself.
Though Mark Ganson's MeshRemodel workbench looks interesting: https://github.com/mwganson/MeshRemodel
And FreeCAD is not the best tool for correcting broken meshes, which are commonplace. MeshLab and the vaguely-on-life-support AutoCAD MeshMixer are better at it.
STEP/IGES is as you say more or less essential if you want to work with code-CAD output in any other serious context. STL is not enough: it is like converting to JPEG in the middle of a photo editing flow, not at the end. It destroys information — in this case geometry.
You might find DeclaraCAD interesting.
KCL can be exported to STEP and STL.
If you're talking about CAD in general I can see your point.
For FreeCAD specifically, there looks to be an OpenSCAD import process directly. I don't have experience with how it works, but that may be better than going through STL