Htop is an example of a good TUI but it doesn’t really look like a traditional “drawn” GUI.

I think that is the distinction that parent is making.

In a TUI environment (ignoring mouse support) traditional GUI elements and layouts often don’t make sense. Like one of the examples with all the radio buttons in small boxes.

The good TUI apps like htop, newsboat, mutt, vim/emacs, tmux all have mostly line-and-column oriented simple layout primitives.

You can use the TAB key and spacebar to navigate TUI widgets, there's no need for mouse support. TUI layouts can definitely be overdone, but they're also useful in many cases.

What's wrong with radio buttons in a TUI? The "good" htop uses checkboxes which is almost the same and works just fine.

Htop is great. Lately I've been reaching for a way to get an overview of process clusters (like firefox or vscodium like to make), and I can see there's an open feature request in htop for that. Would be a nice thing.

top is ok, but I'm always confused about the key-combinations, and the view is cropped (command line arguments etc.), so a scrollbar or some on-hover popup seems needed here.