Though the TTY system is clearly historical accident: Hacks piled on hacks on early Unix system to make actual teletypes work, then enshrined in POSIX and need for compatibilities sake.
C++ always seems to me pretty absurd just because C++ people don't seem to know better ways, and seem to think to much about squeezing out the least little bit of performance instead of aiming for simple abstractions that are performant enough. Also, the last 40 years of programming language development seems to be unknown to them, or at least doesn't influence their decisions, or if they pick up a new idea, it's implemented in the most possible awkward way (because, again, performance).
C++ always seems to me pretty absurd just because C++ people don't seem to know better ways, and seem to think to much about squeezing out the least little bit of performance instead of aiming for simple abstractions that are performant enough. Also, the last 40 years of programming language development seems to be unknown to them, or at least doesn't influence their decisions, or if they pick up a new idea, it's implemented in the most possible awkward way (because, again, performance).