Right, DOS expects wildcards to be handled by programs. Besides avoiding problems from the shell expanding wildcards in problematic ways, this also enables some

Right, DOS expects wildcards to be handled by programs. Besides avoiding problems from the shell expanding wildcards in problematic ways, this also enables some neat semantics like some tools accepting wildcards in multiple locations either for recursive path mapping or for a purpose similar to regex capture groups. It also substantially reduces (but does not eliminate) the need to be careful when including literal wildcard characters in commands. The problem is of course that wildcard handling ends up being inconsistent between tools or entirely missing, although in practice this became less common as various Win32 calls related to file operations had internal wildcard handling, so applications got a basic form "for free". As with many things in computing it's hard to say that either approach is superior to the other. PowerShell carries on the DOS tradition of not expanding wildcards in the shell, but provides a more complete and standardized wildcard implementation as part of the API to improve consistency.