Less specific interfaces let you do less interesting things, but are more resilient. It's an engineering tradeoff. Purpose-built interfaces that fully expose and understand domain-level semantics are great in certain circumstances, but other times you want a certain minimum abstraction (IP packets and 'bags-of-bytes' POSIX file semantics are good examples) that can be used to build better ones.
If the rollout of HTTP had required that all the IP routers on the internet be updated to account for it, we likely would not have it. Likewise, if we required that all the classic Unix text utilities like wc, sort, paste, etc. did meaningful things to JSON before we could standardize JSON, adoption would likely have suffered.
If the rollout of HTTP had required that all the IP routers on the internet be updated to account for it, we likely would not have it. Likewise, if we required that all the classic Unix text utilities like wc, sort, paste, etc. did meaningful things to JSON before we could standardize JSON, adoption would likely have suffered.