I don't know enough about these things to know why, but I have pretty much always had to hack $TERM to get things working smoothly with any remotely featureful terminal emulator. I have occasionally needed similar hacks for Kitty and urxvt, for example (though top and ncdu seem to work fine).

The way terminal applications handle different terminal emulators on Linux just seems to be a bit broken. I don't think it's a particular indictment of Ghostty or any one emulator.

I just checked Kitty and top fails on Debian 12, so I think I was unfair in just calling out Ghostty for this