I think they’re talking about a certain kind of “brutalist UI” that used to exist because it was the only possible UI for very simple systems (e.g. switches to bang bytes into registers to bootstrap a machine; character-oriented VRAM you wrote to directly; two-character Unix commands to save line-printer ink; etc.) and then was carried forward as a sort of tradition by people used to that restrictive minimalism (e.g. modern uses of Forth; C for application programming; shell commands that are non-interactive even when run directly from a PTY; essential config files in arcane formats that aren’t easily machine-generated, under the expectation that people are doing system bring-up by hand, Linux-From-Scratch style; etc.)
