Personally, I have never felt constrained by the performance of my terminal, so I pick based on other features.

(I have, also, thought about building my own perf-optimized terminal. It's a fun problem space!)

The lifetime rendering-time savings wouldn’t even offset the five minutes required to install it and make it my default terminal.

I would need to display roughly 70 GB of benchmark-equivalent ASCII output before Shitty recovers a five-minute switching cost relative to GNOME Terminal.

This assumes I’m actively blocked by every byte being rendered.

Because I don't need to. I've never even once thought "my terminal feels slow and I want to find a different one". My terminal (xfce4-terminal) also uses a GUI toolkit that makes it visually fit in my desktop, and I like that.

Regardless, sometimes you just gotta write some code because there's an itch that needs to be scratched. Sounds like this author really wanted to see if he could write a super fast terminal, and make one faster than the incumbents. It's a cool achievement!

For example, flicker free resizes for MacOS, something that neither Kitty, nor Alacritti, nor Ghostty can boast of.

Any project I see on HN now, I have no idea if the developer will still be interested in it in a month. I'll stick with ghostty because of its reputation.