But given the very first sentence:
> CR and NL are both useful control characters.
I'm willing to conclude that he doesn't intend A Blaste Against The Useless Appendage of Carriage Return Upon a New Line, or Line Feed As Some Style It, to apply to emulators of the old devices which make actual use of the distinction.
> I actually never worked on a hardware terminal in my entire career
I used to look books up at the library using a VT220. In the late 1990s they replaced that with an ASPX web browser endpoint running on PC hardware, and it was terrible. But I'm also not quite old enough to have used them for programming.
You're completely correct that it's no longer emulation of hardware terminals, there are dozens of input and output sequences which no hardware terminal ever used or understood. In many ways it's now emulation of XTerm, but even that era is slowly being left behind.