> honestly, —long-flags are rarely useful in practice. Unless you have no man page to figure out what the single letter options do

I agree for the general case: typing commands in a terminal. But I often use long flags in scripts to improve readability.

To increase the readability in scripts, one can use comments. Long options only increase the likelihood of going over someones preferred column count, forcing one to use newline escapes, splitting the command over multiple lines - especially if the command in question is indented. Does that really increase readability? I don't think so personally.

I do the same, along with longer variable names. Every time I went back to look at old code, I am so grateful that I used the more descriptive information.