The computing industry is weird about history. People fail to understand it in two opposite ways:

A lot of things just fail to pay attention to the fact that other people have seen and solved the same problem before. You get people not just reinventing the wheel, but ignoring the huge design space of wheels that’s been explored and deciding that cubes are ideal shapes for wheels and concrete the ideal building material. See pretty much every recent GUI for hundreds of examples.

But at the other extreme you get a weird worship of the past. Smart people in the past did something this way, therefore we must do things that way! The fact that their target audience was PhD students and their constraints included a processor that was barely faster than a pen and paper and had 128 KiB of RAM is irrelevant. Early UNIX did glob expansion in the shell not because that’s more sensible than providing a glob and option parsing API in the standard library, but because they didn’t have enough disk space or RAM to duplicate code and they didn’t have shared libraries. If you have shared libraries, the right choice is very different. Similarly, ‘everything is a text stream’ is a good idea when you have a computer that you connect to via a serial terminal because everything that the user produces or consumes is a text stream. When you have a system that has graphical displays, speakers, cameras, microphones, and network connections, it is much less sensible.