I've always thought the fact that our modern VTEs still being stuck in pure text mode is a regression. We've already settled on terminal control being VT-100 (or more accurately ANSI sequences).

Given experience from prior windowing systems like rio and Oberon, why isn't it standard fare to have programmable text, built-in text processing in terminal windows and bitmap images? TUIs are only the tip of the iceberg, and the inclusion of aforementioned features would obsolete plenty of use cases for GUIs, along with making a lot of task automation so much easier. Application launchers and things like "let me hack a quick script to do a processing job" then become unnecessary.