To me they are much better than browser/electron/native gui because they are light on resources, very predictable, portable and honestly they get the job done. I used k8s Lens and it gave the impression of being efficient because of the high density of information, but I haven't felt like I downgraded when I moved to k9s, and now I can manage my clusters, develop their charts using neovim and browse the web without getting dangerously close to filling 16GB of ram. Before with Lens, Pycharm and a browser that would swallow the ram whole and spit its decaying bones to the swap unreasonably often.
On k8s/devops tooling: I'm building tuis.nvim [1] — Docker and Kubernetes management as Neovim buffer TUIs, built on morph.nvim [2], a react-like UI framework for Neovim. Stay in the editor (if you already use Neovim, of course) instead of switching to k9s, works over SSH, same Vim keybindings you already use. Also has plugins for Bitwarden, process management, and file exploration.
[1] https://github.com/jrop/tuis.nvim [2] https://github.com/jrop/morph.nvim
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