I think they're only better for CLI tools that are in the training data. If it's a new tool, you'd need to dump the full documentation in the context either way.

Tools like Claude Code have improved here. They won’t load all tools but instead rely on tool search. Context bloat of MCP servers was a thing if badly written clients but it’s certainly getting better

Because it was started before the revelation MCP was a context hog. https://github.com/LaurieWired/GhidraMCP

This is what I was thinking, or fewer, more versatile tools. Having the description of 110 tools in your context window at all times is just noise.