Simple question: why not a cli instead? As seems that lately LLM and agentic tools seems to be better at using clis rather than bloated MCPs?

This is what I was thinking, or fewer, more versatile tools. Having the description of 110 tools in your context window at all times is just noise.

I think they're only better for CLI tools that are in the training data. If it's a new tool, you'd need to dump the full documentation in the context either way.