There is more to it than just CR/LF. As we moved from physical typewriters to printers a large quantity of printers were controlled by Main Frames. The translation to PC printing is not always one to one replaceable. But a few of the reasons behind separating the commands go well beyond the speed of the head.
CR was used to BOLD lines by typing on the twice.
SLEW and TAB commands were used heavily to move the head around a line as code was VERY procedural. You may want to call a common DATE function to print a date on a line, but the head my not be where the date needs to go, so you tab or slew the head to the proper position. Then LF and reset.
Take a look at the word BELL, think of a manual typewriter and then think of why it showed up in print function code for years and years.