I feel compelled to reply, because a lot of this contradicts my experience. I use wezterm + tmux on linux, iterm + tmux on mac. (Already an advantage there, tbh)

> vim bindings should already be available in your emulator, without the need for tmux

They may mean things like the vim-tmux navigator plugin, which makes it so if you hit e.g. the left-most window in vim and hit your go-left keybinding, it will go one tmux pane to the left. It's pretty crazy how seamless it is, and it's made possible by the fact that you can query tmux outside of the process and run commands on your running sessions, which I'm not sure you can do with any of the standalone terminals?

Tmux also doesn't prevent you from using c-x e. I'm aware of the vim terminal, but I'm very picky about my multiplexing and have not been satisfied by any built-in terminal in any editor.

> You just have to remember that a session is the same thing as a window.

A session is certainly NOT a window. It is a buffer. There is a difference, and that difference matters and comes with advantages that are separate from the advantages of windows.

> First off, switch because your emulator is probably more resource intensive

I'm not entirely sure if this is true, but it's utterly uncompelling to me. Holding my binding for 'switch window' will switch through n windows faster than I can mentally digest, and the lag is lighter than any gui app I've used.

> It may also be missing modern features like being able to view images (see sixel, chafa, or the kitty graphics protocol), ligatures, and a lot of other features

I'm not sure why you'd assume this? My setup (wezterm or iterm + tmux + fira code) indeed has ligatures and sharp image viewing passed through the multiplexer

> Second, tmux lacks many of these modern features. Doing a passthrough can help but dealing with images is not a great experience. I have found no configuration where I can reliably view images and never have been able to produce images of the same quality. I always drop out of my session if I am entering a file browser like yazi or fzf

Yazi is exactly what I use, and it works great with iTerm + tmux or wezterm + tmux.

I really don't want my terminal to do that much for me to be honest. I change terminals every couple years, and it's nice to not have to fuss around with them whenever that happens. I haven't changed my tmux config in about 15 years