The same isn't true for modern embedded devices, they don't have tile rendering hardware. If you connect a i2c/SPI screen (SSD1306, ST7735), you write all the pixels on the screen (or pixels to some subregion of the screen), these screens do have a backing memory in them.

So in order to draw a line, you will - objectively - have to copy/move more bytes if you approximate line with character symbols.

This isn't a big deal, but crazy efficient it is not.

All the efficiency when drawing on those screens mostly relies on how well you chain together DMA transfers to portions of the screen you want stuff to be drawn to, so that SPI transfers aren't blocking the CPU (that's assuming you don't have memory for a second full-screen buffer).