Funny you mention Linear’s specifically, I just posted about moving to a CLI instead because of the MCP’s egregious token-usage [1]. While this doesn’t discount the points you mentioned, I think the context savings (which can be huge, I hadn’t listed all differences in that post) outweigh them specifically in Linear’s case. It is just too inefficient in that regard.

Edit: this of course says nothing about MCP vs API/CLI in general. It’s just a bad implementation by Linear.

1: https://thebiglog.com/links/linear-cli-instead-of-linear-mcp