Terminals are a central idea affecting Unix process control and hierarchy, and signal delivery. Emulating them was the easier decision that didn't require any changes to the rest of the system. You introduce a virtual terminal device and the rest stays the same. We are still trapped in those basic abstractions of the 1970s without even noticing them, building shiny stuff on top.
But why are we in 2023, and people are still coming up with fancier versions of "top" that try to draw graphs in text? Every modern computer boots to a graphical console. Every terminal emulator in a GUI runs in a graphical environment. Wouldn't be be much nicer and much less awkward to actually use pixels?
Reducing everything to a monospaced text character is a beautiful and simplifying constraint, IMO. It gives me as a user a sense of predictable consistency that I really appreciate.
