I find it odd that in that list it seems the word "modern" is synonymous with "colourful". I agree with phillbush, many of these new tools are not scriptable.

Other than that, it's a good thing that most of these tools are aiming for a more user friendly interface. However, it would be unfortunate if someone finds the traditional *nix coreutils too difficult to use and turns toward one of these tools as an alternative. The coreutils are important to master since they're available on most (*nix) systems. One example is grep(1) which is an incredibly useful tool to gain fluency in, as most systems don't ship with ack, ag or any other grep-like.

On the other hand, are we really gonna use the tools they used 40 years ago forever? I think it's good that people are trying to innovate, but I don't see much innovation in these new tools. Most of them are, as I alluded to earlier, just colourful variants of traditional command line utilities. Some of the other utilities like tldr and cheat seems to be fulfilling a need: Better documentation in the StackOverflow style of asking simple questions about usage without having to sift through a man page. This presents more of an issue with the popular style of documentation found on UNIX-derived systems today, which can be greatly improved. Just look at GNU info, the introduction of hypertext in documentation is an amazing addition.

I'm starting to think that the interaction method of the command line itself is the element that is bottlenecking the innovation in this space. It's simply too restrictive. I'm not saying I'm opposed to a command line-oriented workflow; I thoroughly enjoy it myself. However, we're still using mostly the same kind of technology which was popular in the 70s even. If you want an example of innovation in this space (which unfortunately has not been carried over to *nix systems) is the command line of Lisp machine operating systems like Open Genera. It has a highly advanced autocomplete system in addition to having every part of the output being able to be selected and interacted with. It's so effective there's not even a cd(1) equivalent command for it, it's simply not necessary.