I experienced the same thing. The big Brokerage firm I worked for in the 90s had amazing TUIs. You could fly through the screens. They even had DMs and group chats. Pretty amazing. The next company I worked for was rolling-out a GUI replacement for their TUI interface and I watched people's productivity plummet as they went from keyboard, to mouse for every text box... Those old mainframe TUIs were amazing, probably the result of decades of time and motion studies.
My "smart" thermostat was past being supported when I bought it from Home Depot, lol, I put back the mercury switch thingie from 60 years ago because I had no idea how to get rid of it anyway.
The "best" book I ever read was Moby Dick because everybody tells me it was, and because I could never make it through Ulysses. The book that was the most fun to read was The Count of Monte Cristo. And my favorite book is The Diamond Age.