Not to make this discussion personal or anything, I'm curious have you ever worked in Ruby? You say things like "why bother" and "trying to squeeze blood from this turnip" as if you don't understand why someone would love Ruby.

Anyway, I do agree with your argument. Unfortunately Ruby is from the generation of programming languages in which I/O was just seen as an api, so the sane thing was to just map to the system api directly.

JavaScript is from that generation as well but got lucky because its requirement to run in the browser forced it to have I/O fully abstracted.