The parent poster was likey refering to the fact that good apps should suppress colors when output is not a tty, so that all the text-processing tools work prop

The parent poster was likey refering to the fact that good apps should suppress colors when output is not a tty, so that all the text-processing tools work properly. This works identically in all the shells (and even without a shell), and there is no "50 years years of techinical debt" (unless you mean the idea itself of in-band control codes)