Which are sort of effective ways of “outsourcing” the UI development on projects where you don’t have the funds (or the talent) to make a great UI.
However, there are additional tools that let you do "bulk actions" by directly editing the Dwarf Fortress memory while it is running - these are technically a UI bypass.
The actual UI is just difficult to learn but once you do it's surprisingly easy to use - it's consistent in its own inconsistent way.
This "sell it on steam with a GUI" is actually brilliant, because lots of people will buy it and some will play - but it gives those who like the idea but don't actually want to play an excuse to give Tarn money.
I feel like that's a stretch. Just look at how many people play Rimworld, which has a fundamentally similar concept but much, much easier to understand UI/UX.
The game is kinda gimped because he doesn't know how to multithread it.
Other aspects of DF are now technically multithreaded if I recall correctly, but that's for sound and graphics and stuff that doesn't really remove the pathfinding processing.
Lots of the newer features like burrows, etc, are to allow the player to help the pathfinding algorithms.
edit: In that with dfremote, df itself runs in a docker container on a server somewhere, and the UI is running entirely on your ipad.