I'm a game developer mainly writing/reading/debugging C++ on a codebase that's well over a million lines of code. As with most game-dev I'm developing almost entirely using Visual Studio, and I can't imagine trying to navigate code using a terminal based editor.
Maybe it's just because this is what I'm used to, however I just don't see how some of the tools would even be displayed in a terminal (parallel stacks window, for example) without some horrible ascii node graph.
GUI's are definitely more than just bloat. Possibly not for what the author us developing, but there is definitely a use for IDEs/GUIs.
What kind of navigation are you relying on that could not possibly work faster on a terminal?
Horrible ascii graphs look horrible, but they are arguably more functional in that you can navigate them with your keyboard.
Navigation is rarely the limiting factor in development speed. I'd take better auto completion / integrated tools over faster navigation every day.
I hope that language servers fully take off. This way, Vim and Emacs can gain semantic autocomplete & navigation. To be clear: it's not that they can't have that in principle, it's just that engines for semantic operations are difficult and expensive to write, so they were made primarily by IDE companies - and until recently, it meant they were tied to those IDEs.
With that, the only remaining thing in which IDEs are a better choice than vim or Emacs is debugging. I wish for decent and fully featured debugging TUIs.
I've never been a big debugger user, but I thought if you like LSP, you might be interested in Microsoft's analogous debugger protocol:
https://code.visualstudio.com/api/extension-guides/debugger-...
I imagine Emacs, vim, and friends could implement their own frontends for this, much as has been happening with LSP.
And it turns out, Emacs and vim do implement their own frontends for this - [0], [1]. My wish just literally came true!