Comment by tosti

Not just that. There's no escape sequence to tell a terminal to draw every character input as something else and if there was, it may not have worked across all the different terminals out there.

I suppose you could do character buffering and quickly change to normal, print an asterisk, and back to silent mode in one write. But likely there's always some kind of edge case where things work differently. It's not difficult to disable so this may be better for the 99% and the 1% can change it back.