You're absolutely right! It's much more common to have a VT220 on a wheeled stand that you can bring over to the rack, with a set of cables already made up. No

You're absolutely right! It's much more common to have a VT220 on a wheeled stand that you can bring over to the rack, with a set of cables already made up. No breadboards! That's amateur hour. Or, fairly frequently, one VT220 hooked to a serial terminal concentrator that lets you select which of the 32 or 48 machines you want to be connected to. Or a VT220 emulator in that smart serial terminal concentrator, that's addressable by SSHing in. Or a VT220 emulator in an IPMI access point directly in each server, that's extremely common. SSH in, then connect to the serial terminal.