The cat and pipe are semantically easier to understand though, at least that has been my experience when onboarding new hires. While Bash has all sorts of nice

The cat and pipe are semantically easier to understand though, at least that has been my experience when onboarding new hires. While Bash has all sorts of nice bells and whistles for various use-cases, I really think they are only worth relying on when you are doing something highly specific. In general mastering wildcards and pipes is sufficient for the vast majority of situations, I think for everything else it's better to use commands that people can easily search or find the man page for. In the world of pocket supercomputers as you called it, interface is king. So I'd argue that if anything, `<` is the useless one here when we can could just have just used the more semantically obvious cat and pipe instead.