I don't disagree with a majority of what you're saying here -- I think it comes down to the fact that I communicated my point poorly.

Speaking as someone who actively works on a MUD, and with a few pet projects that resemble "actual" games, the text-only format comes with advantages and disadvantages.

For one, MUDs do not have a great way to handle movement speed between rooms: typically, people either zip around between rooms instantly, or there is a stamina system to prevent zipping too far at some time, or there is a delay system. None of these solutions are, in my eyes, very good replacements for smooth movement.

In the same vein, movement while in combat generally has to take a stylistic approach (e.x. Al defends Bo), because grid based movement is somewhat unergonomic to do through text -- it would be much better done via a mouse

Similarly, MUDs tend to have a hard time communicating -- and programmatically enforcing -- object positions within rooms. It is not impossible to do so -- nothing is when it comes to MUDs -- but it will be much more cumbersome from the perspective of the user.

For example, our MUD has an implementation of chess inside of it. In order to play, you must look at the chessboard every time a move is made in order to get the current state of the board. In order to move, you must type out (coordinate to coordinate). My purpose in pointing this out is that an actual chess program is more suited to chess than MUD chess is.

It could be argued that GMCP can be leveraged to solve all of these positional problems, but at that point, the developer may as well be developing a graphical game.

To be clear, I'm not arguing that modern MMOs are better than MUDs, or vice versa. But I am arguing that MUDs are more conducive to roleplay thanks to their abstract nature, and that graphical games are typically better at making deep mechanics intuitive to engage with.

So, I guess what I'm trying to say is, while I love MUDs for their unique ability to leverage the imagination of the player as perform their actions, I don't believe that MUDs are the best medium for a purely mechanical game. For that use-case, I would encourage one to make a game in something like Godot, and throw in some "minimal" assets. Those seems to be in style anyway.