There are fantastic TUI frameworks for Rust, like Ratatui[0] (there are a lot more options, this is an example). You can write beautiful TUIs in native languages, without ncurses or C or C++.
Go has such frameworks, same with C# (which you can AOT compile) and so on. You're not stuck between javascript and C.
[0]: https://ratatui.rs/
Yes I also used Bubbletea. I don’t know about ratatui but honestly I think the hate for react is very blind. It’s not like CC is shipping an embedded web browser. It’s a framework on top of an embedded language that has seen a crazy amount of optimisation.