I think the come back is completely driven by Claude Code. Claude Code is a TUI, Claude Code is successful, therefore let's make everything a TUI!
I'm pretty sure the success has nothing to do with the TUI though. I personally enjoy it a lot but the productivity boast doesn't come from avoiding the mouse.
It is driven by Claude Code, not because it's a TUI but because you can paste a bad TUI directly into CC and tell it to intuit what to fix, whereas uploading a screenshot is more cumbersome and less likely to be parsed correctly.
I think TUIs have started to become popular again a few years ago, before Claude Code was released?