I must be a fossil living under a rock, but: were they ever gone? As the amount of new CLI based applications I install on a monthly basis is always far more than the amount of new GUI based applications.
I think a lot of new developers used GUIs very exclusively for a very long time. Agentic workflows and Claude code have brought CLI tools to the forefront again.
A good example of this that I've noticed is a lot of newer devs were using GitHub Desktop or VS Code to manage git operations, but Claude gave them peek under the hood and now they're using it directly a bit more. Claude Code is a great gateway drug to CLI and TUI addiction