The following knows there is no CTID so shouldn’t I be able to get something similar programmatically?
[sysprog@nucky lz_pgmod] (h-master-LZRDB-4714)*$ psql -U postgres -d postgres -c "select ctid, 'test'" ERROR: column "ctid" does not exist LINE 1: select ctid, 'test'
All that shows is that a column named ctid is not presently in scope (the absence of a table and use of a name for the column guarantees that). That "ctid" and the system column named "ctid" are utterly unrelated; they just happen to share the same character sequence.
Data values do not have any concept of their surrounding context. They are just, basically, POJO or JSON Objects. They are created and passed around never caring how they were born or how they might die, they just live in the moment.
That is how it is and I suspect no amount of arguing would convince us to complicate things.