As someone who
did grow up on Windows and still uses it regularly alongside Linux, I want to respond to this comment just to play the Devil's advocate (i.e. infuriate you).
> especially so since the entire concept of UNIX is that everything is a stream of bytes.
I consider this an archaic, anachronistic, ancient, outdated, primitive (they all mean the same thing; I just used a thesaurus to really drive home my point) file model. While it made sense for the limited computers of the early 1970s, it is extremely hobbling today and the fact that no one really complains about it is... quite astounding. If every file is merely a bag of bytes, then every native program shall have its own file-parsing/byte-parsing routine. What a waste of effort, writing and rewriting parsers over and over again.
The fact that one has to write a shell script that is interpreted, and itself calls not one, but three other binaries (cat, grep, awk) with arcane, not-easily-remembered flags just to extract out certain words in the last several lines of a file is... ridiculous. That you have to call 'file' instead of directly querying the OS or shell for file attributes is farcical. Consider PowerShell or Python as alternatives to shell scripting. In the former, the entire .NET library is available; in the latter, the default libraries may be imported as one sees fit, and additional libraries are available online.
> defeats the purpose of the OS abstracting it away for the user
The UNIX philosophy does a poor job of 'abstracting it away from the user'. For well-abstracted OSes, see any smartphone today (especially iPhones).
Furthermore, not every UNIX/Linux user interacts with their computer solely over the command line; I use KDE Plasma, for instance. In general, when I see a file on Linux with no extension, I expect it to be a binary; I am surprised when it is, in fact, a shell script.