alt Hacker NewsPerhaps the average TUI fan is someone who correctly recognizes the negligible relevance of typography in optimizing their computing workflows, and prefers monospace fonts for purely functional reasons, which naturally take precedence over merely aesthetic concerns when working with functional tools.
The total abandonment of the form-follows-function principle on the part of purely visual designers, who worry about what software looks like without considering what it's for, has led to 10-15 years of cumulative usability degradation in almost all categories of software. TUI and CLI software remains one of the last bastions of people actually designing interfaces for functionality and usability.
You can't dismiss typography as irrelevant and trivial aesthetics. It's a whole field encompassing many things including legibility to humans. There's nothing more "functional" than principled crafting of legibility for each UI element. And no, a crude "Just use the same font in a single size for everything" approach is not the endgame for legibility.
Just because there have been some crappy industry trends doesn't mean the answer is to turn away and permanently regress to the confines of a terminal emulator.