Comment by thaumasiotes

You can see the same phenomenon playing a roguelike game.

They traditionally have ASCII graphics, and you can easily determine what an enemy is by looking at its ASCII representation.

For many decades now graphical tilesets have been available for people who hate the idea of ASCII graphics. But they have to fit in the same space, and it turns out that it's very difficult to tell what those tiny graphics represent. It isn't difficult at all to identify an ASCII character rendered in one of 16 (?) colors.