Terminal emulators are bloat

The Linux kernel itself contains a terminal emulator

that's how you can swap among virtual terminals on the console

and unless the code was rewritten at some point, that's really the true core of Linux; the Linux kernel originally was a terminal emulator, before the other stuff got added. Before Linus even made his first announcement, when it was still a purely one-man project that he was banging on:

https://lunduke.substack.com/p/the-very-first-interview-about-linux

The very first interview about Linux with Linus Torvalds - Oct 28, 1992

LN: Please give a short summary of the history of Linux.

Linus: Difficult. "Linux" didn't really exist until about August-91 - before that what I had was essentially just a very basic protected mode system that had evolved from a glorified "Hello world" program into a even more glorified terminal emulator. Linux stopped for quite a while at the terminal emulator stage: I played around with Minix, and used my protected mode program to read news from the univerity machine. No down/upload, but it did a fair vt100 emulation, and did it by using two tasks which communicated from keybodard->modem and modem->screen.

By mid-summer -91, "Linux" was able to read the disk (joyful moment), and eventually had a small and stupid disk driver and a simple buffer cache. So I started out trying to make a filesystem, and used the Minix fs for simple practical reasons: that way I already had a file layout I could test things on. After some more programming (talk about glossing things over), I had a very simple UNIX that had some of the basic functionalities of the real thing: I could run small test-programs under it.

That being said, I think that most people are probably using the framebuffer console these days

you aren't usually talking to your graphics card in text mode on x86-64 machines, but rather in graphics mode, and an image of text is being rendered and handed to the graphics card, and I don't know if internally, the original virtual terminal code is used beneath that or if there's a different stack and two independent in-kernel virtual terminal emulators.