How are GUIs "way better at this stuff"? I can't see it, but would like to understand how you feel that a GUI can improve on the management of automated processes at scale.
TUIs can have GUI like affordances UX/UI wise regardless of if they use the terminal as the contract or a window server/gui lib
A GUI app could be a non-bloated, self-contained binary too. There's nothing intrinsic to GUIs that prevent this. TUIs are, after all, just GUIs that use text characters instead of pixels.
> that can run on windowless server envirorments just fine
Who cares? Who runs without a graphical window manager? Kubernetes is from the ground up a network application. The entire point is you don't SSH into nodes any more, you run management tools from completely separate computers that have window managers. The fact you can run stuff like this in a text console is nothing more than a novelty and a curiosity in 2026. I guarantee almost everyone running this will be running it in a terminal emulator in a WM.
> TUIs can have GUI like affordances UX/UI wise regardless of if they use the terminal as the contract or a window server/gui lib
Yeah, but it's slow and cumbersome compared to a GUI and it's an incredibly inefficient use of the thousands of pixels available on a modern screen.