There are pros and cons to verbosity and to using many files vs one.

Cron needs a special tool to edit it because you can break a bunch of stuff trying to edit another, very easily, and by accident.

The commands themselves when I was first learning I found easier to remember than things like dmesg or /var/log/ ... they all follow similar conventions and aren't so chopped up short that you can't guess what they do by looking at them.

Similar to how most people don't prefer 3 letter variables in code ... I'm glad we've largely moved on from 3 letter commands. Granted, if you use them a lot you should definitely make your own three letter aliases in your preferred shell scripting language.