Displaying hidden text is one of the places where text browsers can "fix" broken web pages. There are broken web pages that hide the text you want to read until you click on some JavaScript modal, or some "Click to continue reading" link/button that breaks scrolling. w3m displays hidden text and greatly improves readability on many web pages.
You can argue that using the CSS display property is a bad hack around the poor performance of adding/removing DOM elements, but the general problem of trying to automatically adapt a GUI application to terminal display does not change (having the GUI be emulated in HTML that is meant to be displayed in the GUI of the web browser just adds a layer of indirection, difficulty, and inefficiency). On the other hand, web pages that are really hypertext documents wrapped in useless and inaccessible JavaScript and CSS can have all of the event handlers and CSS properties ignored, and become legible again. This is something that text browsers do well, and why text browsers continue to be relevant today.
> w3m displays hidden text and greatly improves readability on many web pages
Are you saying that ignoring CSS rules for hidden content improves readability? I find this very hard to understand. For example something like "Thanks for submitting this form" appearing on page load is not an improvement to readability.
You can argue that using the CSS display property is a bad hack around the poor performance of adding/removing DOM elements, but the general problem of trying to automatically adapt a GUI application to terminal display does not change (having the GUI be emulated in HTML that is meant to be displayed in the GUI of the web browser just adds a layer of indirection, difficulty, and inefficiency). On the other hand, web pages that are really hypertext documents wrapped in useless and inaccessible JavaScript and CSS can have all of the event handlers and CSS properties ignored, and become legible again. This is something that text browsers do well, and why text browsers continue to be relevant today.