I was under the impression that Windows Terminal is a recent greenfield project.

Yea. Microsoft has two terminals. Command Prompt (cmd.exe) which is the default that comes with Windows, has been around forever and basically never seen a significant update. And the new Windows Terminal which is the recent greenfield project that only works on recent versions on Windows 10 and doesn't ship with Windows by default (yet).

Unfortunately people often get the two confused when talking about "the windows terminal".

And see, even you've done it here. Command Prompt is `cmd.exe`, which is different from PowerShell (`powershell.exe`), and both of those are different still from `conhost.exe`, which is the actual console window itself. cmd and powershell are "shells", which both need to run in a console, and conhost.exe is that console (which is the "terminal window" for these applications). More reading: https://github.com/microsoft/terminal/blob/main/doc/Niksa.md...

Conhost is the window that's had updates all throughout Windows 10. It's responsible for both the console subsystem, and the console UI. The UI though is the part that's largely being replaced by the Terminal. Conhost will never go away, but the Terminal is where all the action is these days.

(It's also shipping with Windows 11 by default)

Corporate practices are to blame here also, where instead of improving the existing solution, a new project is launched, which often carries nothing from the previous one.

Then the public will conflate two products, and some will avoid the new one not knowing if it's here to stay (another corporate antipattern).

Actually, the Windows Terminal shares a lot of its codebase with the Windows Console. The buffer, the VT parser, the renderer interface, most of the UIA implementation - that's all the same code. Improvements here to the Terminal actually help conhost.exe as well.

The UI of the Terminal is what's new, because trying to iterate on the legacy UI of conhost.exe was simply not maintainable.