[treadmill]

This is actually useful and portable (e.g. also works serial console). QR Codes are not.

I actually scrolled up to check this was not an April fools article.

[nine_k]

I don't see why the handler could not go back to textual mode is the console is serial.

Some devices have neither a serial console nor a text-mode screen powered by BIOS; all they have is a framebuffer device. There a QR code could work really well. No need to have any font data, for instance.