I still prefer to have cat there because it is interchangeable with other output-producing commands and it can handle globs. In an interactive session I iterate on the last command many times, and if I decide to filter stuff can just replace cat with grep or if I decide to pull from a directory of files can add a glob, if compressed it turns to zgrep or zcat etc. With redirects I'd have to change the structure of the pipeline which wastes mental effort. IMO.