What I am mostly suggesting is iterative. We wouldn't switch to shipping graphics because as you say they're bandwidth intensive. RDP is not the right answer ho

What I am mostly suggesting is iterative. We wouldn't switch to shipping graphics because as you say they're bandwidth intensive. RDP is not the right answer however useful it is for some things. But a shell+terminal hybrid focused on running processes, managing outputs, and making it easier for the user to run programs could do a lot of that remotely with a helper program similar to how tmux and git binaries need to be on the remote system. Or how vscode runs a fairly beefy system in order to support remote coding that not only allows editing code remotely with auto complete, but lets you launch multiple terminals to run commands. In a sense I'm really saying: we have like 80-90% of what a "modern" shell could look like in vs code remote... why can't we just make the shell like that? One thing which I do not have a good solution for is input because I don't know exactly how reliably a shell would know it's being asked for input from the application. The other thing being that I think this shell could support a legacy mode which is triggered by those escape codes, but most apps don't do that. As you said they just print text cause it's easy and fast. That's exactly what my python scripts at work do and a better shell that I suggest could handle plain text pretty easily. The issue is things like Vim, Emacs, Tmux, and other curses-like apps. But that could be a fallback rather than the happy path.