Let's be honest here. Curl to 98% of people is http/1 requests with some post params and maybe json body, with some custom headers. Most language standard libs (which might be using libcurl) can facilitate writing that relatively quickly. And probably with a more 'modern' CLI.

Curl though, is a very wide breadth project. It currently supports the following protocols: DICT, FILE, FTP, FTPS, GOPHER, HTTP, HTTPS, IMAP, IMAPS, LDAP, LDAPS, MQTT, POP3, POP3S, RTMP, RTMPS, RTSP, SCP, SFTP, SMB, SMBS, SMTP, SMTPS, TELNET and TFTP.

Each one of those is a massive undertaking of protocol/spec management, edge case handling, cross compatibility, hacks, and much much more to make them work. Then to put a stable C api on top of it all to be a cross language toolkit is a MASSIVE undertaking.

But, again, the "idiots" who posted those comments, aren't talking about any of this. Perhaps they shouldn't care to. Most folks I know don't even know about the other protocols curl supports and have only interfaced with curl through its http. Frankly there are nicer http cli's out there with less code that _can_ be written in a weekend (assuming they piggy back on a http lib).

What Daniel Stenberg achieved is giving the world a fantastic, reliable, cross protocol, cross platform and cross language network library that can be used as the foundation for many projects. I'm sure few of those cited would claim they could do that.