Most likely answer: they don't work in a text-only environment e.g. an ssh session

FTFA:

No fussing around with your mouse, or alt-tabbing to another window, or waiting for a JVM to start. It’s there at your fingertips whenever you need it. It literally loads the 50,000 commits of the JIRA codebase in a fraction of a second.

And:

In short, it is the mutt to your Outlook, the Vim to your Emacs, the w3m to your Firefox.

The author doesn't like that it is written in tcl/tk. I have no idea how this would matter at all unless he plans on modifying the source. I happen to like gitk and use it often. What language it's implemented is of little concern to me. At one time I used tig(it is pretty old at this point), but it never really caught on for me. Perhaps I didn't give it enough of a chane, perhaps it's much better now.

In my experience, gitk and other TCL/Tk apps are pretty ugly. That might be enough for some people. Doesn't stop me.

If the article is any indication, the problem is that it's written in Tcl/Tk. Sounds like language-zealotry to me.

For one, they do not work when ssh-ing into a remote machine.

on osx, speed. both those tools are quite slow to fire up compared to tig. other gui alternatives are even worse.

..or an alias for "git log --graph --abbrev-commit --pretty=oneline --all"