Generality gives us a lot of flexibility and the ability to build generic tooling. Once I know how use Unix pipes then I can work with things I have never seen

Generality gives us a lot of flexibility and the ability to build generic tooling. Once I know how use Unix pipes then I can work with things I have never seen before because they speak the language of pipes. But it doesn't mean that because a system is general that it has to turn into a turing tar pit. You can layer specifics on top of the generality. Just because I can pipe something to a process doesn't mean that it will accept anything on the pipe. It has an interface and that can be strongly typed.