[MrJohz]

I'm not sure that's true. There's lots of ways to use and manipulate the DOM. But React is particularly special because it turns out to be a simpler way to think about UI components. A TUI has nothing to do with the DOM, but it's got a lot to do with rendering UI components. So taking the ideas from React and applying them to drawing elements in a terminal makes a lot of sense.

Arguably it makes even more sense than with React. One of the problems with React is that the underlying DOM is a stateful, imperative system, whereas React wants to behaves much more like an immediate-mode system, where the whole UI can be dropped and re-rendered at any time. But the terminal is not stateful like the DOM, and a more immediate-mode paradigm arguably works better in this context than in the browser.