But to your question, yes there are 'text' console bitmap graphics protocols. Check out sixel for one example: https://saitoha.github.io/libsixel/ Some terminal emulators support other bitmap graphics too.
That is not accurate, and your example is absurd abomination of the text-based concept (but is nevertheless a fun demonstration of capabilities).
I run TUIs that push hundreds (sometimes thousands) of changes per second to a 80x48 canvas. There is zero lag induced by the front end.
And if you are sending video or animated graphics, then perhaps a special video-orented protocol is a much better choice. Like that browsh project - I am fairly sure the performance would be much better with special protocol.
Run `arch` in a terminal. Does it return `arm64`?
Interestingly, I just opened Alacritty on my M1, and it's showing `arm64` now. I know it didn't before. The app has been upgraded because macOS's security tools blocked it when I tried to open it and I had to explicitly allow it.
Maybe it was an issue that they've fixed since I last looked?
Honestly I wonder if there is a way to speed it up. Like a new terminal mode which lets you write or color a particular row/column directly, or utilizes the GPU to render to each pixel, or really anything better than literally printing text with fancy spacing, escapes, etc. on each refresh.
Until then, anything which is render-intensive you're much better using a GUI, even if it's just a shell script which opens a window while it's running.