I don't see what crusty implementation details have to do with a philosophy. In fact, UNIX itself is a poor implementation of the "UNIX" philosophy, which is why Plan 9 exists.
The idea of small composable tools doing one thing and doing it well may have been mostly an ideal (and now pretty niche), but I don't think it was purely invented after the fact. Just crippled by the "worse is better".
The idea of small composable tools doing one thing and doing it well may have been mostly an ideal (and now pretty niche), but I don't think it was purely invented after the fact. Just crippled by the "worse is better".