Another thing about bytestream oriented interfaces like pipes is they tend to turn every program into a parser in order to reject invalid input. Eventually someone is just going to put a type system on top of that parser to reject more than just syntactically valid programs, but also semantically invalid ones.

As such this notion that "we don't need types, we can have parsers." kind of argument doesn't feel very inspiring.

As a reductio ad absurdum, statically typed programs are also (represented as) streams of bytes!