Not to start the whole "I hate Electron" thing again (that conversation has been had -- err over-had ;-) ), but I think it's relevant to both Eshell and DomTerm (such as I understand it): I don't want an interface running in such a massive infrastructure. I use Emacs as my daily editor these days and I still don't want Eshell (I don't want to have Emacs up all the time).
But I think the arguments ring true none-the-less. Our ancient terminals are awful. Colours are basically a hack upon hack. You can't rely on getting text effects working properly. Throwing tmux/screen into the works is almost necessary and as much as I like tmux the complication at the interface between the terminal and tmux is insane. How many times have you used vim or emacs in tmux in a terminal and found that somehow the terminal settings aren't getting through properly? I'm practically an expert in that stuff now (through long hard experience) and sometimes I still run into problems that leave me scratching my head.
We're ripe for something new... but I don't think an application of that kind of girth is going to cut the mustard. Again, I'm super happy that people are tackling this problem and if it works for you, then more power to you. But I think that I'm probably pretty representative of the kind of person that lives in a terminal. I can't see that kind of thing getting popular.
What would be awesome, though, is the generation of a new set of standards. We need "terminal mark 2" that has these kinds of abilities and we need standards that will allow interoperability towards applications running in these terminals. For example, as much as the article asks if we need terminal capabilities like ncurses -- I think we do. But we also need capabilities like being able to spawn panes in a tmux pager (just like a window manager). We need proper history navigation, cut and paste (across and ssh session!), etc, etc. These things need to be environment agnostic so that we can build an ecosystem of tools that will become popular. If people want to live in Emacs, or in Electron, then great. If not, then there are potential options.
I know it's a completely half formed argument, but I hope it resonates with some people :-)
I suspect modern terminals just evolved underneath you and you didn't notice since you were looking for a revolution. Most of what you want, you can have. I actually like eshell because I can "cat someImage.png" and it will literally inline the image for me on the terminal.[1] I don't think this is limited to eshell, either. I just don't know how to do it in other terminals.
To be clear, I think it is enticing to imagine a perfect solution. I just don't think it is fair to ignore all of the work that has happened. Nor do I think it is realistic that something will be able to get past the ridiculous cost of entry at this point. There is a reason eshell isn't a complete shell replacement.
To be direct to your points of things we need, though. I think you'd be surprised at just how well eshell does all of them. The only real limit to how well it works is that piping a lot of commands together is limited due to everything going through a buffer. For those cases, "shell" and then doing whatever I was wanting to do, works like a champ. And if I am really wanting to do some fancy stuff, an org buffer is better anyway.
[1] https://emacs.stackexchange.com/questions/3432/display-image...
xterm supports sixels, which do real graphics:
https://github.com/saitoha/libsixel
The img2sixel program does what you want in terms of catting an image to the screen and having it show up correctly.
(Scroll down on that page to get to the per-terminal documentation.)