It's more that they are embracing that the LLM is smart enough that you don't need to build-in this functionality beyond that very minimal part.

A fun thing: Claude Code will sometimes fail to find the skill the "proper" way, and will then in fact sometimes look for the SKILL.md file with tools, and read the file with tools, showing that it's perfectly capable of doing all the steps.

You could probably "fake" skills pretty well with instructions in CLAUDE.md to use a suitable command to extract the preamble of files in a given directory, and tell it to use that to decide when to read the rest.

It's the fact that it's such a thin layer that is exciting - it means we need increasingly less special logic other than relying on just basic instructions to the model itself.