Well, I would argue "the point is" the ability to easily understand when and how something works is useful; and, to that end, having the behaviors of something

Well, I would argue "the point is" the ability to easily understand when and how something works is useful; and, to that end, having the behaviors of something directly in front of you is thereby valuable in a way that shouldn't be dismissed, particularly when the language it is all written in is the "lineup franca" of system administration: shell. I have often wondered when something happens and why it happens at some point and simply grepped my way through /etc seeing exactly how the extremely simple startup behavior of those "cumbersome shell scripts" worked, and taking that away and hiding those behaviors into some complex C program to save a tiny bit of startup performance seems like a sad tradeoff, particularly for people just beginning their journey of discovery (like, I ostensibly don't need it anymore, as I can now read complex C programs and have in fact carefully scrutinized the code for the various eras of Apple's launchd, and so have a pretty solid understanding of exactly how everything works... but 25 years ago, being able to do that on Slackware because it effectively just had this beautifully simple shell script that just ran stuff as if it wasn't hard... that showed me the beauty of this system and how easy it is to bootstrap these things: the world didn't actually get more complex since then in a way where any of this cruft is actually necessary).