I imagine the comment about less being "annoying" to show is just about conveying the interactive TUI in an unchanging plain-text form, given that the terminal

I imagine the comment about less being "annoying" to show is just about conveying the interactive TUI in an unchanging plain-text form, given that the terminal wouldn't ever contain both the invocation and the output. And the comments about useless cat is just a gag/OCD.