I've been building BASIC32, a retro BASIC interpreter for microcontrollers so I can flash it once and easily create lots of new projects.

What you give up with the authors approach is "read". The screen becomes write-only. There are only a few functions that require reads: getting a pixels current color and doing operations like flood fills or paints.

Because I was going for the retro feel of BASIC, I wanted to support these, so I opted for a frame buffer. It isn't as technically cool. On the RP2350, it does require low resolution and low bit rates because they often have RAM limited to KB.

If you step-up to the ESP32-S3 variants with 4MB or 8MB of RAM the frame buffer gets much easier.