Hard disagree. I very much like my terminals thin and "stupid" (sixels, clickable links, speed, and workable CJK font/IME support are about the non-standard features I really want), leaving all the navigation to something like tmux/zellij/screen.
There are other features a desktop terminal emulator can not give you. And being able to maintain all the shortcuts and muscle memory across devices, servers, X11/Wayland, different DEs, and inside nested VNC or SSH sessions, more than compensates for "impedance mismatch" (curious what you're actually referring to here... Just putting a line in my shellrc to start a new tmux session unless the TMUX env var is already set makes it mostly seamless and you could do the same in terminal emulator conf if you dislike putting such things in your shell or profile).
Unix philosophy: I want my graphical terminal emulator to render my sessions on my display. The stuff happening inside should mostly not be its concern.
> I shouldn't have to
Good thing you don't have to, then. For casual users, emulators like Kitty, xfce-terminal and Konsole exist and are quite popular. Yeah, a batteries-included terminal emulator sounds more appropriate for you and probably the majority. For "niche" users like sysadmins and many power users, tmux is the table-stakes. There's no one-size-fits-all and not everything has to be for everyone.
As for me, I like the “do one thing well” philosophy — I don't want my terminal to manage multiple sub-‘windows’, because I already have a window manager that I like just fine thank you.
`tmux` is actually more than I want, because it interposes itself as a terminal emulator in its own right (hence, per the thread parent, requiring its own sixel support on top of the display terminal's) and use `dtach` instead: it's just a pass-through session holder. Something like `tmux` is necessary when you want to connect to a session from significantly different terminals (say, iTerm on a Mac and Konsole on *nix) but I don't do that.
There are other features a desktop terminal emulator can not give you. And being able to maintain all the shortcuts and muscle memory across devices, servers, X11/Wayland, different DEs, and inside nested VNC or SSH sessions, more than compensates for "impedance mismatch" (curious what you're actually referring to here... Just putting a line in my shellrc to start a new tmux session unless the TMUX env var is already set makes it mostly seamless and you could do the same in terminal emulator conf if you dislike putting such things in your shell or profile).
Unix philosophy: I want my graphical terminal emulator to render my sessions on my display. The stuff happening inside should mostly not be its concern.
> I shouldn't have to
Good thing you don't have to, then. For casual users, emulators like Kitty, xfce-terminal and Konsole exist and are quite popular. Yeah, a batteries-included terminal emulator sounds more appropriate for you and probably the majority. For "niche" users like sysadmins and many power users, tmux is the table-stakes. There's no one-size-fits-all and not everything has to be for everyone.
> GNU Screen
Well, there's the topic of the thread...