I grew up on the Commodore 64. This machine had not enough resources to do much with its graphics modes so essentially the usual way to use it was text with custom characters plus sprites [1]. I think text base plus overlay is an incredibly powerful combination.

A while ago I coded this up with a Ratatui subset on the Commodore[2] but I think this paradigm could be useful for modern TUI apps as well. One example I'd use that for is a minimap, which is quite awkward to do in characters.

[1] Plus the occasional whole screen offset and raster effects.

[2] Code is not public yet but there is a screenshot how it looks. https://github.com/weinzierl/8-bit-rust