[Analemma_]

If there were some kind of standard or widely-followed convention for Unix tools to print plaintext, I wouldn't mind it so much. It's the fact that you need to memorize a different flag and output format for each tool, followed by an awk command where the intention of the code is generally very obtuse, which bothers me. By contrast, for all its faults, the fact that PowerShell has unambiguous syntax for "select this field from the output" helps a lot with both reading and writing. e.g. to get your IP address, "Get-NetIPAddress | ? {$_.InterfaceAlias -like "Ethernet" -or $_.InterfaceAlias -like "Wi-Fi"} | select IPAddress" is a lot clearer in intent than the Unix equivalent regex soup, and it can be written without looking anything up by printing the raw output of "Get-NetIPAddress" to the shell and seeing what you need to filter/select on. You can even get tab completion to help.

A hypothetical Unix equivalent doesn't need to be JSON, I just brought that up as an example. But any structured data would be an improvement over the situation now, and as the PS example shows, with the appropriate ecosystem tooling you can do all the data manipulation over pipes.