A few years back I un-bashed my life as much as possible in favor of nushell (though it's not the only shell to encourage structure). I feel like it has really helped me notice a lot of this-needs-more-structure type problems outside of my shell that I otherwise wouldn't have.

The elegance of the unix-y approach is actually that it's all bits. You can just join things together and shove the bits through, that's a wild simplification compared with having vendor-specific kinds of plugs. But we could have that kind of compatibility while also benefiting from structure.

So I encourage everybody to give a shell with structured output a try, let it rewire your brain, and then ask yourself: how is the OS holding this back from being everything it could be? Because if we build that OS, it won't encourage these problems.

When I imagine it, it would probe either side of a pipe to see if they support negotiation. If not, send the bits through in the same old unixy way. If so, use the newest schema for structured data that is supported by both sides.