Actually this reminds me, what is the deal with tar command recommendations to use or not use dash? I know GNU tar accepts both (e.g.) tar xvf file.tar and tar -xvf file.tar, but at some points people were like "NO! Don't use the dash! It's going to maybe cause issues somewhere, who knows!" and I was like "OK". Something to do with people up designing the Unix specs?
POSIX. POSIX didn't get designed but documented behaviour that was portable between different UNIX flavours and was then declared a standard.
If you're annoyed by it just consider the xvf in tar xvf to be a subcommand as pull is in git pull. Tar simply has a fancy subcommand syntax. At least it's not dd.