The UNIX way would be to break things down into actual programs, where each one would be doing one thing well - and in such a way that they'd be useful as building blocks for solving other problems also.
That's not great.
Unfortunately been dropped into that situation. The system was constantly broken due to missing of malformated arguments. Nobody dared to change anything.
Same applies to prematurely microservicing a monolith. At least there folks seem to be sensible enough to use protobufs or json, instead of loosely typed strings.