It's probably a 15+ year old application, which, if it was web-based, would be built on 2-3 out-of-date webstacks, badly joined together, with who knows how many security flaws.

Compared to maintaining that, ncurses doesn't sound too bad.

True.

I used to provide dev teams with cli tools (testing, infrastructure debugging, etc.). They used them from time to time but only after implementing basic gui with tkinter or simple html/js/css they started to use them more often. I prefer terminal more than gui but if you don't use terminal 90% of the time it's much easier to click the button on a website.

You are right - that's ncursesw ;)

Hypothetically... Late 90's web, which wasn't bloated with 150mb javascript files which run your CPU at 10000000%...