So absolutely true. I work in an “operational facing” engineering group. We are engineering but process data (daily/monthly data processing for factory and customer requests).
Having a composable process using the Unix philosophy makes it trivial to stop processing at any point in the work flow for that one customer request that comes up once a year. There is no ROI to make the work flow support these edge cases, it’s cheaper even after a decade or more just to one-off these special cases.
But this would be completely impossible if we didn’t architect the system in smaller components. As you say, it’s not text processing, it is units of processing that can be composed, stopped, reordered or have a custom step in the middle.