I'd also propose that the motivation is that some sort of short stack will be all that's available on the tiny embedded processors that are being increasingly built into things. If you want to get under the hood, you're going to have to be able to connect by terminal or serially. Not everything has a screen or keyboard, and this more primitive way of working is a lowest common denominator. It also doesn't hurt that it is a viable approach on bigger hardware and the cloud as well. Back to the Swiss Army Knife analogy.