GPU rendering matters a lot. For the experienced developer who does all their programming in a terminal, being able to get crisp instant feed back with each key press is critical for a pleasant experience. Other terminals without this just feel too sluggish.

After spending the beginning of my career remoting onto mainframes via low baud serial connections, all terminal emulators now feel responsive to me :)

One of my colleagues at my first job didn’t even have a direct connection to the mainframe when he started. He used to write his code on paper, get a typist to then enter that into the mainframe and he would get the output a day or two later. Which meant he had to put a lot more care into checking for syntax errors before handing the code off to be entered and compiled.