Sounds like choosing the wrong environment for the application. A console terminal is for displaying console text. It needs 8, maybe 16 distinct colors. Some might argue it doesn't need colors at all.
Some might argue it doesn't need letters either.
I have a project that involves maintaining an image database of about 15,000 images. The images come from one of three canonical sources, or they can be gathered manually and added. Over time, more data points get added (typically every few years a new batch of a few hundred are added), and manually added images are replaced with canonical images, and canonical images upgrade in quality. I wrote a command line tool that basically allows me to monitor missing images, available upgrades, sources for each image I have, etc.
So, I run my tool, and it says, say, "there is a canonical version of image 12714 available, do you want to replace the current version?". Typically it's going to download both versions, and I'm going to proceed by imgcatting both versions and making a judgment call. This is happening on a remote server than isn't running a windowing system. I make a decision there and it's solved quickly.
Absent imgcat, the workflow is that I maintain a full copy of the database on my local machine, rsync the image directories, use a window manager to open a file explorer and preview both versions of the image, make a judgment call, and then return to the same terminal environment where I tell the same command line application which version to keep. Repeat several hundred times. This doesn't seem like a better workflow to me.
So I guess my question is how do I benefit from my terminal emulator not being able to display images, based on the design I've just told you?