I disagree with your first statement there. In Unix, everything is a file, including all devices, which also consist of protocols for driving them which are read and written via binary encodings. You would simply be leaving performance on the table if you chose otherwise. I think, perhaps that you're talking about the philosophy around how shells should be used, in which case, you're actually arguing for writing everything as scripts instead of running binaries. It's kind of irrelevant, I feel. Performance matters, if it didn't, we wouldn't care about the size of blocks in Bitcoin, how long it takes to spin up a node, or the utilization of resources in general. Just my two cents.

But in any case, for sure it's possible to swap out the underlying encoding format, but as you said, when accounting for network effects, it's going to be tough to get any adoption, especially when there's an aggressive push to not accept thought from outside the inner circles here. I'll leave it there.