alt Hacker News> Modern cloud systems shouldn't even have shell access, immutable containers with telemetry data.
Genuine question, what is your alternative suggestion to accessing lower level features then? A hard time I have with GUIs is that their input/output can't be piped. It's much more cumbersome to try to automate a GUI than to automate something in the terminal.
Whilst I get that this is about TUIs, I do believe there is a reason for shell access due to automation. Good abstractions can be put into the GUI, but I'd argue that you should first build the abstraction, then put a GUI on top of it. AWS is a prime example, any of their APIs can be used w/out AWS Console.
Look at Plan 9's devdraw. https://man.9front.org/3/draw
devdraw can be thought of as a 2D rendering engine. You load assets like text, bitmaps and so on then issue draw commands to render them. There is no SSH. Instead you connect to a remote machine and export resources served by your local machine including your keyboard, mouse and display, each of which is a network transparent microservice. The window manager, Rio (and others), multiplexes access to these microservices. You can run a graphical program without a window manager, e.g. you can boot right into Doom or the Acme editor. It's seamless and can run over any pipe that can push 9P including ssh. If you look at the Sam and Acme text editors you will find they are true modern TUI programs.
Shame we had a cloud ready OS for 35+ years and no one noticed. Instead were living in the 60's with GPU accelerated typewriter emulators.