I often use cat because when constructing a pipeline I'll do multiple rounds of:

    head filename | ...

Once its working I find it easy to just type C-aM-dcat (i.e. beginning-of-line kill-word cat).

Thanks for the reminder (sincerely) but to me this is worse, I would use a shell which doesn't offer this particular form of irregular grammar, I hate it.

100% aesthetic, I shouldn't be able to point a file at my prompt and have it end up streamed into the next word. Just awful, 0/10, do not want.

It's preference, like Python list comprehensions vs Ruby method chain.