By the same reasoning: Would you not use databases because they have a schema? or JSON...? Heck, even utf-8 could be too complicated.

You have a point. That sounded like pure conservatism, and to some extent it is. But still, text is simple and that what makes shell powerful, trying to move to higher level abstraction is has a chance to create fragmentation and break the solid foundations on which Unix is built.

Because parsing text is shit. Good luck AWK'ing everything. Datastreams are simple.

It's often better than trying to figure out the weird formats all the tool would use otherwise

So start outputting something like json. And render it in the console as an ascii table