Better terminal emulators probably played a role too. In particular the newish Windows Terminal. The older cmd.exe console only supported Windows Console API. WinTerm has full VT and ANSI support, much better font rendering, and less importantly, mouse support and Sixel support.
This makes it much easier to build cross-platform TUIs. It used to be a chore, now it's probably easier than most GUI frameworks. (Possibly with the exception of Electron, but that comes with a different set of trade-offs.)
The console is conhost.exe. Conhost (Console Host) is the same kind of program as Windows Terminal, iTerm2, Konsole, Ghostty or Linux Console (the console that Linux uses on text mode)
The shell is cmd.exe (Command Prompt). This is the same kind of program as PowerShell (powershell.exe or the cross platform pwsh.exe), bash, zsh, fish etc. It's also similar to any TUI program such as Far Manager, mc (Midnight Commander), lazygit etc.
This makes it much easier to build cross-platform TUIs. It used to be a chore, now it's probably easier than most GUI frameworks. (Possibly with the exception of Electron, but that comes with a different set of trade-offs.)