The author seems not to be aware of the recent TUI rennaisance[1]. There are libraries like termbox and blessings (python) that are a middle-ground between full ncurses and adding your own ansi codes. There are a lot of modern TUI frameworks like tui-go or tui-rs that bring common GUI conventions back to the TUI (heck there are TUI programming libraries that are designed to be similar to react) - these too tend to be a lot nicer than working with ncurses.

Definitely worth checking out the full landscape these days if you're going to dive into making your console programs prettier.

[1] My words, I just coined that name (although I wouldn't be surprised if others had said it too). I mean that in the last ~decade there has been a lot of TUI work in the background, with lots of new programs and some pretty stunning results. I blame unicode - once the web folks realized they could use something like font-awesome instead of sprite-sheets (or maybe as a pre-build sprite sheet?), and the "icons in a font" movement took hold, terminal programs got a lot prettier too. It makes sense, its the same font/font renderer provided by the system no matter if the app is a browser or terminal emulator.