I agree with that many present tools expect character grid, but moving away from character grid would be not as much work as it seems IMO.

Code can be aligned with elastic tabstops ( https://nickgravgaard.com/elastic-tabstops/ ) or virtual formatting (that things are aligned according to syntax regardless of whitespace).

Things to align in terminals are mostly tables, and they could be rendered as tables if the terminal supporting that knew that they are tables. Nushell natively supports tabular data structures, so rendering them as proper tables would need just one change – the table renderer.