That's gotta be part of it. But I think another important part is how TUIs have important restrictions that lead to surprisingly delightful applications despite their downsides:

- You don't have control over font size and your color palette can be limited (and chosen by the user in their Terminal settings), so it's hard to go too off-the-rails in aesthetic design

- You work on a strict character grid, so it's hard to get things like padding, margin, and leading wrong.

- You can't assume the use of a mouse, so everything has to work on keyboard shortcuts. This usually leads to extremely power-user-friendly tools. Plus, keyboard-driven, power-user-friendly UIs are hot right now, even on the web (Linear, Fernand, etc.).