no, it's all about auth. MCP lets less-technical people plug their existing tools into agents. They can click through the auth flow in about 10 seconds and everything just works. They cannot run CLIs because they're not running anything locally, they're just using some web app. The creator of the app just needed to support MCP and they got connectivity with just about everything else that supports MCP.
Write better CLIs for the agents of the less-technical people. The MCPs you're talking about don't exist yet either. This doesn't seem complicated; MCP seems like a real dead end.
How are those CLIs being installed and run on hosted services? You'll need to sandbox them and have a way to install them automatically which seems difficult. How does the auth flow work? You'd need to invent some convention or write glue for each service. These are far more complicated than just using MCP, regardless of the benefits of the protocol itself.
If one doesn't sandbox agent run environment then there is a problem there already.
I think a big part of why this discussion is coming up again and again is that people assume the way they are using AI is universal, but there's a bunch of different ways to leverage it. If you have an agent which runs within a product it usually cannot touch the outside world at all by design, you do not need an explicit sandbox (i.e. a VM or container) at all because it lives in an isolated environment. As soon as you say "we use CLIs not MCP" well now you need a sandbox and everything else that goes along with it.
If you can tell ahead of time what external connectors you need and you're already sandboxing then by all means go with CLIs, if you can't then MCP is literally the only economical and ergonomic solution as it stands today.
We wanted telemetry and observability to see how agents are using tool and docs.
There's no sane way to do this as an org without MCP unless we standardize and enforce a specific toolset/harness that we wrap with telemetry. And no one wants that.