The article is a deep dive on the evolution on terminal color, mentioning some of the "colorful" characters in the scene. This is specifically about the ultimate 24-bit expression of gawdy terminal bling, aka COLORTERM=truecolor. Perhaps you're not the kind of person who would notice if their Emacs color theme looked wrong because the theme designer's carefully chosen 24-bit color was mapped to the nearest color in the 256 color palette of the stock terminal.
Oh, I am that kind of person, believe me. Mine looks identical in the terminal. I use zenburn theme. The only thing I ever set in my bashrc is `TERM=xterm-256color`. I'm not sure why. I do have `COLORTERM=truecolor` set, but I didn't do it myself. It just works for me with or without those variables set in both xterm and alacritty.
