Vim, for example, excels at quick nimble edits for someone who darts around the filesystem in their terminal. Even if you have to pop back into your shell for a command or two while editing, you have the option of C-z and `fg`.
The same thing applies to many TUI tools as well. Many of them deliver things you could get with more primitive tools, as well (say `btop` and `htop` vs `ps`), but have a nicer feedback loop while still allowing for pop-in-and-pop-out interactions. GUI alternatives would have you pushing the mouse around a lot without much benefit.
That, and they work well through SSH, without the hassle of setting up X11 forwarding. For other TUI tools that are typically used in longer sessions (e.g. `gdb`), that is also a huge benefit. Most likely you won't even realize how huge until you have tried to set up a non-TUI alternative for the same scenario (the remote debugging service for Visual Studio is a nightmare to set up, for example).