Comment by mprovost

The point is that we always exist at a point on a continuum, not at some fixed time when the current standard is set in stone. I remember setting up Solaris machines in the early 2000s with the painful SysV tools that they came with and the first thing you would do is download a package of GNU coreutils. Now those utils are "standard", unless of course you're using a Mac. And newer tools are appearing (again, finally) and the folk saying to just stick with the GNU tools because they're everywhere ignore all of the effort that went into making that (mostly) the case. So yes, let's not let the history of the GNU tools dictate how we live in the present.