I think that's because it's super common to use cat to quickly view a file. It has the nice property of using your terminal's scrollback rather than putting you into a pager application. For that use-case it is an alternative to cat.

That said, I've never really cared much about missing syntax highlighting for cases where I'm viewing file contents with cat. So the tool doesn't really serve a purpose for me and instead I'll continue to load up vim/neovim if I want to view a file with syntax highlighting.