Timelines are by no means a gimmick. Out of the box, btop has good rendering of key metrics .. htop does too, but btop is easier to read in a console (imho). Nothing cyber about it. “Ooh cyber” is a lame straw man but hey, you had to make it.

Btop is pretty and has good defaults for many things.

A performance monitor is not a good interface to strace, nor is it a good replacement for lsof, nn, arp, etc.