PublishSettings is for when you want to publish directly from visual studio. Whereas azure cli is command line interface for general use meaning it can be used to automate your CI/CD pipeline from any where not necessarily from your PC. So, it has got different parameters and supports everything that is supported by PublishSettings. For example you can use az webapp up
to deploy code and to change app settings of the web app you can use az webapp config appsettings set
. Unfortunately, there isn't an option to pass publishsettings as parameter.