I'm not sure I'd characterise these parts of the Unix philosophy as 'wrong'. For example, if you are writing a shell program for use by somebody else, then having that program work with text streams makes sense. The focus here is interactive use and short functions/programs for local use, though, which means that the text stream part of the philosophy becomes a less pressing consideration.
> I would welcome a discussion of how the Unix philosophies break down, or what they prevent. But I didn’t find that here.
At least as far as text streams go, the readme talks about awkward considerations like '-0' and '-print0', but more generally, when the command doesn't output a known format like XML or JSON, parsing the output can be fun (e.g. per https://stackoverflow.com/a/15643939). Oftentimes the response is "the command has flags for getting the data that you want", but it's simpler (IMHO) not to build this sort of functionality into every command, and instead just have the shell support it more nicely, whether by providing a function that produces a first-class value (e.g. 'ls', 'ps' here) or by providing more generic parsing functions (e.g. 'split', 'splitr' here).