Terminals that can render UTF-8 have been a thing for a while; my goofy shell prompt can attest to this.

If you want to surf the multilingual web in your terminal, screenshots seem to indicate that Links (a venerable text-mode web browser) renders Unicode text just fine: http://links.twibright.com/features.php

>Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

Despite your snarkiness, this is a perfectly valid point. If i'm not gonna use certain features in a piece of software, that feature may as well not be there. There are enough alternatives so that people that do need to use these languages are well served. But if that's not my case, there's no point in making my stuff compatible with it since it's not of any use to me

> Yea, who cares about Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, Thai. F those languages!

do you think the necessary scripts for those languages was only displayable once GUI web browsers were developed?

they're all delivered to browsers today as text (unicode certainly covers all of them simultaneously, an improvement on their situation in the 90s). i believe there are sufficient fonts to display them in text mode (gnu unifont would do at least a half-assed job of it, all in one font).

what do you think is missing?

I just tested the Wikipedia home page in five different text-mode browsers. All the scripts you listed appear just fine. (Granted, none of them display comically large headings using ANSI block-pixel art like the mockup in the article, but multilingual bitmap fonts exist.)