it's possible the person asking the question is younger than good old manpages.

Everyone born after 1972 is younger than man.

Now I feel very old.

To be fair, they could. Some VT terminals could display ReGIS and Sixel graphics.

Sixel is a terrible standard, BTW, but at least it can be easily integrated into the character flow of a page. ReGIS (and Tektronix) can't.

Yet they don't...to be fair.

I guess that if we manage to force sixel support into xterm, QTermWidget, and VTE, we'd have a reasonable excuse to add graphics support into man and info for terminals that have sixel graphics in their termcap entries.