I'm not that familiar with IPFS I must admit (though it looks great conceptually), but if using the curl CLI tool, why would the operator not just curl the public gateway address?

I'm confused on why such a shallow abstraction was put into something present on every device, and why this seems to be such a big deal to the decentralized community.

Even with it's automatic gateway detection it's purely used to rewrite the URL, which seems like something the operator could easily do themselves.

I could easily be missing something here though.