I use rxvt-unicode which sets $TERM to "rxvt-unicode-256color," which is not recognized by a number of server to which I have to connect to from time to time.
There's a whole story about that, part of which is that at the time terminfo had to cater for old systems where there's a limit on the length of a terminal type name. But the same applies as for a missing kitty terminfo entry. The terminfo database is designed so that one can copy records around, and one can put them in a directory in one's home directory if one does not have administrative access to update the system database.
Debian systems have had an rxvt-unicode-256color entry for approaching 10 years, now. FreeBSD for about the same.
Debian systems have had an rxvt-unicode-256color entry for approaching 10 years, now. FreeBSD for about the same.
* https://sources.debian.org/src/ncurses/5.9-10/debian/rxvt-un...
* https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/share/termcap/termcap?r...