I certainly did like the idea behind Powershell's structured-object pipelines, but it relies on that "COM baggage" and "elaborate syntax" that you say are its downsides. I don't think you can achieve the goal behind Powershell of a universal standard binary object format without an elaborate infrastructure like COM and without making a bunch of assumptions and requirements on how those objects must look and behave, which will vastly limit the usefulness of the pipeline.

All of that said... nothing is stopping you from piping binary objects between tools in Unix shells. In fact, it works great, and I'm curious what functionality you are looking for that doesn't exist. The standard tools like cut and grep don't work great with binary data, but they aren't meant to. There are format-specific tools aplenty, and stuff like bbe exist for generic work. And for structured text, tools like `jq` are phenomenal.