This argument always sounds like two crowds shouting past each other.

Are you a solo developer, are you fully in control of your environment, are you focused on productivity and extremely tight feedback loops, do you have a high tolerance for risk: you should probably use CLIs. MCPs will just irritate you.

Are you trying to work together with multiple people at organizational scale and alignment is a problem; are you working in a range of environments which need controls and management, do you have a more defensive risk tolerance ... then by the time you wrap CLIs into a form that are suitable you will have reinvented a version of the MCP protocol. You might as well just use MCP in the first place.

Aside - yes, MCP in its current iteration is fairly greedy in its context usage, but that's very obviously going to be fixed with various progressive-disclosure approaches as the spec develops.