If you read the issue comments, you can see this:

> Specifically, (pseudo-)serial devices, like the Linux console VT, initialize the rows and columns of the tty device to zero. That confuses fish since it now believes that nothing will fit on a line. Fish expects to be running inside a terminal emulator (xterm, konsole, iTerm2, etc.) which sets the tty width and height to the correct values.

So it's not only old hardware. It applies to modern hardware when you're using console to access a Linux server, which is not at all uncommon for data centers or headless servers.