There are definitely disadvantages to use text streams as the universal interface between programs due to its lack of structure. But the timelessness of many of the programs following this pattern and the prosperity that it brings to the CLI ecosystem proved its effectiveness as a design choice. Text can be read by both human and programs. It can be manipulated, printed, stored, trasferred, version controlled with the tools of your choice. For programs that do not inheritantly require structured data, using text streams as interface provides the most flexibility and composibility. — Emacs is the 2D Command-line Interface