Ayyy that's a much more articulate way to put what I was also thinking.

"Being constructed of text characters" is a very loose definition of ASCII art. Not to say it's not visually interesting, but just that it's on the far ends of the histogram of what people think of when they hear "ASCII art".

Personally, I think the fact this is relying on colour for contrast makes this feel more like a shader that quantizes the input into little dots that just happen to be 1 of 3 characters, than ASCII Art. It's a vague border between that and an ASCII shader, and then ASCII art, but there's definitely some measureable distance between those peaks.