This is a common complaint about PS/elvish/etc, but I’m not sure it makes sense. Is that “simple text stream” tab delimited data? CSV? JSON? XML?
At the end of the day, what you have isn’t just a “simple” text stream; you have a more complex data structure serialized into text, which will need to be parsed by each command in the pipeline for any non-trivial processing.
Quite often, yes it's just text. 90% of the time you're only a string split away from having the structure you need. Most of the more complicated systems are chasing that 10% but complicating the 90%.
This is a common complaint about PS/elvish/etc, but I’m not sure it makes sense. Is that “simple text stream” tab delimited data? CSV? JSON? XML?
At the end of the day, what you have isn’t just a “simple” text stream; you have a more complex data structure serialized into text, which will need to be parsed by each command in the pipeline for any non-trivial processing.