3 is the cart before the horse. "Real" terminal apps (i.e. command line utilities) are fine the way they are and you wouldn't use them any differently locally.

3 is the cart before the horse. "Real" terminal apps (i.e. command line utilities) are fine the way they are and you wouldn't use them any differently locally. They don't even need to care if stdout is a tty, and they reap all the benefits from a CLI because you can script them and pipe them into grep/awk/etc... But as soon as we skid into ncurses territory, we're stuck with ANSI terminal codes to make some sort of graphical UI. Those apps don't benefit from being in a terminal (e.g. you can't grep htop output), and there's obviously some desire to make something visually appealing. Using in-band magic escape codes from the 1970s with severely limited functionality for that is just a workaround for the lack of a standard remote desktop protocol that actually works, is reasonably efficient and SSH-friendly. Sure, the fact that you can make ncurses apps feeds back into complacency with the status quo, but that's always true. The enemy of great is good enough. The other alternative is making a web UI, which in principle has the right architecture (run the UI on the client side and only push/pull meaningful data to/from the server), but unfortunately that's tied to HTTP(s), which isn't exactly SSH-friendly. What we'd need is a transport-agnostic version of HTTP that can be given a socket and communicate with the server through that without demanding to know how to open more connections to the server and demanding that those connections be made through AF_INET or AF_INET6 sockets. So again, some server software is implemented as a web UI (like CUPS), but that's a workaround for the lack of something more straightforward that's also a de-facto standard.