Somewhat related ...

Is there a proper name for a "top-like interface" ?

I think that "TUI" refers very broadly to any terminal user interface and both 'vim' and 'alpine' and 'top' would fall under this broad category.

But is there a specific name for a refresh-every-second, full page status output - like 'top' ?

Is there a standard library for creating such an interface, or do people always use curses ? Presumably curses did not exist in the early 80s when 'top' was first written ...

Very crudely, on linux you can do that with almost any CLI progam and the "watch" utility.