So you're saying optional things should be forced on everything, because the rare optional case needs it anyway?

Look up what the Export-Csv, ConvertTo-Json, and Export-CliXml, Invoke-Command -ComputerName 'someserver', or Import-Sql commands do in PowerShell.

Actually, never mind, the clear and consistent naming convention already told you exactly what they do: they serialise the structured pipeline objects into a variety of formats of your choosing. They can do this with files, in-memory, to and from the network, or even involving databases.

This is the right way to do things. This is the UNIX philosophy. It's just that traditional shells typically used on UNIX do a bad job at implementing the philosophy.

If you have network or persistent storage, those parse and serialise steps are better served by a consistent, typed, and common serialize and parse step instead of a different ad-hoc step for each part of the chain (especially if there are then parts of the chain which are just munging the output of one serialisation step so it can work with the parse stage of another).