By "information dense," I meant in contrast to what is typical in modern GUIs: generous borders and margins between interface elements, large buttons, etc. My experience both using and writing TUIs is that, because of the extreme limitations of your tools w/r/t styling and layout, more of the screen real estate tends to be devoted to displaying data, and on whole I prefer that.

YMMV, of course, I'm just sharing my own experience and perspective.

I prefer TUIs personally, but I can't see myself use maps, or visual image editing in a TUI for example, but is vi infinitely faster than vscode for manipulating a codebase? Absolutely.

Anything that lends itself to keyboard input, piping, text manipulation and a bunch of other things are so much faster if you're equally proficient in both input modes.