There are CSV-backed "databases" that you can query with SQL. Selecting a row and returning it is basically copying a string once and replacing all CSV-separators by record separators. Doing a projection requires you to copy the string, remove all fields that are not requested, reorder the fields as requested, resulting in a few more copies, and only then transmitting the answer.
So in this case it would be slower to not do 'select *'.
However, those things have always been exotic, and with the advent of SQLite have become even less common.
However, those things have always been exotic, and with the advent of SQLite have become even less common.