That's fair, but in practice providing one of the printPeer or printChains options is doing the same as step certificate inspect https://example.com and step certificate inspect https://example.com --bundle, respectively, so if intend to return early to pipe the certs, those commands can be used, incl. JSON format.

If instead execution would continue after printing the details, it would be a bit more like curl -v (with more certificate details, of course). That would be like enabling these options results in a more verbose output, which I think is fair, considering the default is to print just TLS handshake details.