If they accept only one positional argument, and do not allow flags after it, yeah that definitely seems weird. Many of these are flag-position-agnostic though

If they accept only one positional argument, and do not allow flags after it, yeah that definitely seems weird. Many of these are flag-position-agnostic though, and for that the -- is a very long-time standard pattern for either "end of this command, forward the rest to the wrapped command" or a list of files (to make a file named --help unambiguous). Many. Definitely not all. CLI interfaces are even more varied than GUIs in many ways.