Strangely enough most of the unix tools do not seem to suffer from this.

do one thing and do it well.

It does not yield nostr clients but then again, nostr clients hardly do one thing. It would not be super complex to pipe a few of these ancient tools and have a very tiny and simple nostr client. Most of these tools have had no major changes in the last few decennia. They do not rely on modern frameworks that are outdated in 2 years and replaced by something better that, again, does do many thing and therefore makes itself prone to becoming outdated very fast.