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.

So, a bit like tig? (Screenshots)

Falls into a weird niche for me - if I'm in a situation where text-only history is not good enough, I'll just use something graphical, rather than some crazy image-in-terminal solution.

Mostly in git I use an alias I wrote/stole ages ago which displays linear history compactly.

Nice.
I tend to use the graph made by git, but always feel like it would make my comprehension faster, if I had a properly rendered tree. But then I have been too lazy to use something like gitk.

Looking at the repo, the code being Rust, I feel like I will give it a try the next time I need to view a graph and hopefully the interface matches my requirements.