I agree with this, and generally take pains to refer to the programs as terminals, not terminal emulators. But at the same time, when a user presses the enter key and stdin provides CR, if you're in raw mode, you can get NL semantics by emitting CRLF to stdout, and that does in fact emulate the behavior of DEC terminals, which do that because teletypes did.
> I actually never worked on a hardware terminal in my entire career
I used to look books up at the library using a VT220. In the late 1990s they replaced that with an ASPX web browser endpoint running on PC hardware, and it was terrible. But I'm also not quite old enough to have used them for programming.
You're completely correct that it's no longer emulation of hardware terminals, there are dozens of input and output sequences which no hardware terminal ever used or understood. In many ways it's now emulation of XTerm, but even that era is slowly being left behind.
> I actually never worked on a hardware terminal in my entire career
I used to look books up at the library using a VT220. In the late 1990s they replaced that with an ASPX web browser endpoint running on PC hardware, and it was terrible. But I'm also not quite old enough to have used them for programming.
You're completely correct that it's no longer emulation of hardware terminals, there are dozens of input and output sequences which no hardware terminal ever used or understood. In many ways it's now emulation of XTerm, but even that era is slowly being left behind.