Perhaps, but the simplicity of the curl command provides enough insight into exactly what it does to understand what precisely it does and what could go wrong. I can see what file it's writing to, I can check that file, I can be pretty sure it's not doing anything else weird behind the scenes.
That's the whole point. You have to manually do those things. It's not that you can't do them, it's that if you tell someone "Just run curl ... >> ..." without the validation part they can get hosed. Even in a script you need to be careful about it because a non-200 HTTP response still gives a zero (i.e. success) exit status.
