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>Modern IDEs can tell me exactly what can follow after a certain piece of text

I don't think that's computable in a terminal.

It could be, if there was a standard format or protocol by which a shell can ask a command what flags/options make sense in what context.

A bit like how man pages are a standard format for static docs, every tool could ship "autocomplete files" which tell a shell how to build the autocomplete. These files could even contain runnable code (in sh or something) without an additional security risk - after all, they came with a program that you're about to run :-)

I'm sure there's all kinds of challenges with this when you go deeper, but when even a relatively lightweight tool like VS Code can give me perfect C# IntelliSense on every major OS, I find it a bit abysmal that unzipping a file from the terminal is non-trivial.

This is pretty much how bash completion works...

That's not exact, it only works when certain conventions are followed, which is the situation we have now and will always have because unlike IDEs which typically autocomplete context free (or nearly so) languages your asking for auto completion to be done on what is essentially a very complex recursive language.

Also zip sucks, use tar or cpio.

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