This is really cool but I’m unsure why exactly the kitty/iterm image protocols are a requirement.

Is it to display the actual ‘graph’ on the left of the screen? If the terminal does not support image display does it degrade gracefully (e.g. unicode symbols) or does it just not work?

If it only works in terminal emulators with specific image support that seems a tad unfortunate for what otherwise seems a very nice fire-and-forget solution for trawling through commit logs.