But GUIs are hard to built - mainly because of tech debts around all three major platforms. But nontheless displaying graphics is harder than outputting control chars.

You could whip up decently usable UI in Delphi far quicker than similar one in any TUI framework.

The problem is that world went away from that and into HTML/CSS/JS/DOM mess that makes simple UI things hard and complex UI things slow and/or hard, on top of the bloat.

This is a recent development.

VB6 could have you roll a GUI interface in minutes, so even trivial tasks could have a GUI.

The tools for CDE on Unices were arguably even better but CDE never really got any momentum.

That it’s tough to put together a GUI now is definitely a regression and Microsoft shooting themselves in the feet regularly over the last 25 years is squarely to blame.