I literally edited my comment just before you said this because I suddenly realized someone was going to say this. No, the point is never just the "screen". The point is the whole buffer including the screen. Clearing just the screen is pretty useless to me, I might as well just scroll down or hold Enter for 3 seconds.
My terminal emulator of choice, WezTerm, has this feature built in [1], so there's no need for using `reset`. Perhaps your terminal emulator has something like it, too?
You could try echo -ne '\ec' or echo -ne '\033c'. Or this from bash/readline:
clear-display (M-C-l)
Clear the screen and, if possible, the terminal's scrollback buffer, then redraw the current line, leaving the current line at the top of the screen.
> Clearing just the screen is pretty useless to me, I might as well just scroll down or hold Enter for 3 seconds.
I actually do that a lot, when I'm done with a terminal window for now but want the scrollback to stay there. ctrl-L to send a pagebreak is what I usually do, or typing something aliased to `clear`.
