Comment by moritzwarhier

this is not ASCII, it looks like Unicode, but it's not even that, it's scripting and canvas rendering.

Text art itself is s prevalent because it borrows the appearance of careful crafting while it's generated by a program. Also, CLIs and text are more popular than GUIs these days, with many people.

Chat interfaces are almost like CLI! Markdown is getting more popular than binary Office text files!

Vibe coding with AI now commodifies the remaining manual steps: obtaining nice raster images, and feeding them into a text-art generator.

Or creating a script that renders them as dots on a canvas (what's done here).