> Why people don’t just learn cron syntax is beyond me.

Maybe the better question to ponder is why is it something that needs explicit learning. It's a basic task scheduler.

The *nix format hell in general drives me insane. Immensely glad for the recent-ish trend of lots of applications at least slowly adopting JSON and others as both config and output options.

> why is it something that needs explicit learning. It's a basic task scheduler.

You still have to learn what exactly this sort of software can understand and that is, imo, no less of a time/effort needed to learn cron.

essentially the answer is that after 40 years of polishing a 'basic' thing it's realized that there is near infinite nuance in use cases and workloads, even without feature bloat.