I don't think the two use cases are mutually exclusive. You can have that keyboard driven muscle-memory workflow, while keeping things discoverable for users who haven't committed everything to memory.
New users tend to get really involved with the buttons, but gradually shift to full text control over years.
Obviously in CAD sometimes you cannot enter coordinates and must grab the mouse... but it's still faster if you minimize use of the mouse.
Tools like Plasticity CAD¹ or Blender feel way more keyboard-friendly in this space.
I've already experimented with dropdown menus and minimizing sections. While I too love the TUI and keyboard driven experience, many want something they can click on, less overhead from every application having their own hotkeys. For me, it's about reaching more people, and the hope that I can bring more of them into the mouseless development experience
To me, these reasons underscore the need for a genuine GUI, rather than a TUI that requires users to open a terminal just to have something clickable.
This is more about blending in among GUI tools, which is also important.
This is what I find difficult to understand, why is that important? And to whom?
It made sense 35 years ago when MS-DOS was shipped by default and you just had to make do.
A full-featured web browser or a video chat client can't be realistically made TUI. I could have run Emacs in TUI mode, but I appreciate variable font support in non-code texts I write.