Granted, this is the extreme, but in my mind this is simply the manifestation of the "do one thing well" mantra of *nix. The basic chains of tools allowing extensibility and chaining from one to another because they're so well-rounded in their own right.
This has always been a thing (reduction to absurdity); these days you just see it more often as javascript libraries for anything you could possibly want.
This has always been a thing (reduction to absurdity); these days you just see it more often as javascript libraries for anything you could possibly want.