I don't get the intention of the author. No, I mean, I get that he wants a 80x25 terminal "eventually" but I don't get how exactly. He says it himself that he has multiple different displays, so even if he did manage to get his text only terminal, it will be microscopic on one of the displays, giant on another etc. For me personally, the whole point of terminal rendered by graphic pipeline is that I can get terminal the same size, same font size, and same everything regardless if I use 1080p scaled to 150%, or native 4K or some ancient LCD display on some old laptop (remember 1024x600?). Ok, maybe it is not religiously pure way and maybe it is not as robust and stable way as pure text, but we do get usable terminal in return at least.

He wants a readable text console at boot.

Also 80x25 has a lot of history, and some things work better at that size.

I don't know if you've ever tried using a non-graphical display on linux recently, but if you have say a 4k display, you get unreadably tiny text. It also breaks a lot of text-mode stuff.

If you've ever tried to FIX this on your system, you'll find a bunch of roadblocks.

You can't just use an easily available font for the console. Console fonts have to be created or converted into a non-standard .pfs or .pfsu format.

most linux distributions have at most a 16x32 font available if you take the time to do the override properly. Even that font is pretty small on 4k.

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Linux_console

I read it as a nostalgia piece.

When terminals were common, they pretty much all were 80 or 40 columns and 25 rows, not a lot of choice, most were about the same size.

I actually like modern emulated terminals, with all the bells and whistles.