I think this is true mainly for legacy interfaces that haven’t yet been optimized for agent use, while still offering a human-readable surface for supervision and intervention.
With more agent-native interfaces, the tradeoff changes quickly. Using @Palmier_io, for example, takes far fewer tokens and is much faster than operating DaVinci Resolve through computer use. Resolve is still necessary, but mostly for certain types or levels of finishing on specific kinds of work.