I'm guessing the perceived burden of debugging when dealing with function chaining (especially when you consider side effects from inheritance, it can get ugly)

I'm guessing the perceived burden of debugging when dealing with function chaining (especially when you consider side effects from inheritance, it can get ugly). This is actually a case where operator overloading could allow for more maintainable code. Usually it's sort of a selfish design choice which provides marginal developer happiness and considerable ambiguity and bloat (in my opinion).