Turning the cursor on and off, 24 bit color, etc. A lot is possible though you potential sacrifice portability (which in 2021 translates to “don’t expect your stuff to render properly if your at the Linux console, and everywhere else it is fine.”)
I 'maintain' a shell script/library that can do a lot of the basic things like color controls, control getch, move the screen cursor, etc. [0]
Taking a peek under covers to see how easy it is. A couple printfs from whatever language is way way less overhead than bundling in the whole of curses.
For too long did I think that curses was the one and only way to do anything with a terminal.