isn’t a “real tty” because it has a metal backend
I was at first confused. Of course "real ttys" have some metal in their back end! (I'm too young and my default mental image of a "real tty" contains a CRT, but there's probably even more metal in a teletype.)
It would still be trivial for the developer to add an “textshot” feature to export a frame to .txt, so I’d still qualify it as fitting the ASCII art aesthetic.