Well, yes.  And by the same token, you can eliminate the complexities of i18n by having only one diagnostic, namely "?" (or by pretending all the world is anglophone).

But setting aside for the moment this style of argumentation, let's consider directory colorization.  I have no dog in this fight, as I set all my terminals to black-on-white as God and Gutenberg intended, and set TERM to vt100 so the colors can't be changed.  However, the feature seems to be extremely popular, and can't be readily done outboard in a pipeline], unlike most of the infamous options of cat(1).  As things stand, the X3.64 control sequences output by colorization are *not* suppressed when the output of ls isn't a terminal, which means I have had to write a stripper for them.  Another example is cal(1), which tries to output the current day in reverse video, which is equally annoying but fortunately can be suppressed more easily by piping it through more(1).