One aspect of sysadminship that I find cute (but suboptimal) is how we memorize this strings of commands that were clearly not quite designed to be used in that manner.
A slightly related example is how our intents in our mind end up having commands that don't resemble at all what we actually want, creating a map between intent and command that is almost exclusively arbitrary except for some obsucre etymological origin that might or might not help you remember the command in a time of need.
For example:
Intent: "create a file"
Command: "touch $FILE"
As it happens, touching a file doesn't mean to create, it was supposed to touch to modify the last access date, like a null op. But now if you want to create a file you do that.
Intent: "Print a file contents to screen"
Command: "cat $FILE"
Is this a reference to a feline? some slang for printing or reading? No it's short for concatenate, but if you pass just one argument instead of 2, it prints the concatenation of 1 file and nothing.
Even something as simple as
Intent: "Rename a file"
Command: "mv $FILE"
Of ocurse there's the fact that moving a file and renaming the file are very similar if not identical in most FS/OS, but also, the slight change from a word to a proper-name style command already creates a style of command line interaction that was very natural in the 80s, but is now being reinvented with the advent of more powerful language decoding technology. So even:
Intent: "Copy a file"
Command: "cp $FILE"
Now to the topic, you can see how my relationship with ss is the mapping:
Intent: "See a list of open ports"
Command: "ss -tulnp"
Which I remember mnmemotecnically because it is close to -tulip. This is similar to ps -aux in that the command includes a set of options and I remember it mnemotecnically ("auxiliary" or "auxilio"), and I use the options even when I don't need them, modifying the options from that baseline if needed, like removing "a" to get just the current user's processes.
That said. I don't know if the future is going to be "better" alternatives to old tools, but rather deconstructing or making use of the concept of "binary":"command", running man and --help has never been an optimal solution, and let's be honest, kids nowadays are googling, stackoverflowing and chatgpting their intent in order to get a magical command.
No easy way to improve upon this at the userspace level, the OS model of delegating control to binaries based on a hierarchical command structure is sensible, and "magic", or sharing commands across binaries without a clear ruleset would be too opaque. But I feel that creating new tools while barely revolutionizing the way they work is too small an incremental change, it adds more noise, I'm not sure that ss2 or network-manager instead of wpa_supplicant is a better outcome, now you are just linearly increasing the cognitive demand of new sysadmins linearly with time.
Sorry to be a bummer.