Yes, I read this, and it is essentially an aesthetic, UX issue. But it does not allow you to do things any easier in practice (at least if you are used to the command line). I was just asking it semi-rhetorically to introduce my question about the inverse transformation.

A command-line interface to clicking buttons on a headless GUI, by naming their labels, would be an extremely useful tool. Even if only worked for applications written with the major toolkits gtk, qt, electron etc.

EDIT: imagine that you could do this:

    ungooey gimp --menu file:open:lena.png --click eraser --drag "10,10-100,200" --menu file:saveas:lena2.png

and it created an image with a white diagonal band erased in white.

You can do that semi-easily on most linux apps using GTK, Qt with AT-SPI: https://delysid.org/gspi.html

most likely both Windows and macOS would have similar mechanisms for accessing their respective accessibility api

It looks like you want a CLI-ified AppleScript.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppleScript