I know, man.

Unless your window full of text is GPU-accelerated, tear-free and composited, with raytraced syntax highlighting and AI-powered antialiasing, what is even the point?

TUIs are great if your structure them around keyboard input. There's more of a learning curve, but people develop a muscle memory for them that lets them fly through operations. I think the utility of this is sorely underestimated and it makes me think of my poor mom, whose career came to an end as she struggled with the new mouse-driven, web-enabled custoner service software that replaced the old mainframe stuff.

The late 80s/early 90s trend of building GUI-like TUIs was really more to get users on board with the standard conventions of GUIs at a time when they weren't yet ubiquitous (among PC users). Unifying the UI paradigms across traditional DOS and Windows apps, with standard mouse interactions, standard pull-down menus, and standard keyboard shortcuts was a good thing at the time. Today it's less useful. Things like Free Pascal have UIs like this mainly for nostalgia and consistency with the thing they're substituting for (Turbo Pascal).

You are conflating a method of interaction with a method of drawing things to the screen. These are totally different things. Whether you have a keyboard focused interface like vim or not, has absolutely nothing to do with whether you are drawing graphics by sending escape codes to a terminal emulator to render the interface.

Neovim and it's frontends prove that if you remove terminal emulators the applications become better. The terminal emulator is just in the way.

There is absolutely no reason to build that keyboard focused interface around the terminal. Just drop the terminal and keep the interface, just like neovim did.