CLIs stink for beginners

That, too, depends. Once I understood the fundamentals (word splitting, quoting) of the shell, I knew how to run any command with any argument(s). When I didn't know a command or its options, the man page was right there. When I didn't know which command to use for a task, man -k KEYWORD gave me useful hints.

But in the GUI environment there was no simple search. I had to rummage through nested application menus to find (sometimes misleadingly named) programs and hope they did something useful. Something similar would repeat inside the application: Some functions are hidden behind toolbar buttons, some are in the menu at the top, others in a context menu, etc. Even if the buttons have tooltips, you can't easily see them unless you manually mouse over them one by one. There usually are certain conventions that most applications follow, but they're not intuitive: A beginner still has to learn them.

(Of course the issue of obscure commands and inconsistent interfaces also exists in command line tools, but the difference is that I can easily automate that one weird set of options or sequence of tool invocations with a shell script. That was true even when I was just learning how to use Linux: If you know how to do a thing manually on the command line, you can automate it by putting the some command in a script file. What could be easier? Whereas with an obscure GUI tool I have to remember what to click where and in which order every couple of weeks when I need to Do The Thing.)

In short: This (former) beginner rather liked the command line.