Anything not CUA compatible feels aged... unfortunately, the standard "terminal" keyboard support is very poor regarding this things (escape key is often broken, modifier keys often compose well at all). What is really needed is a new terminal standard to support this.
The (probably not workable) alternative is to deprecate the whole thing and make a higher level protocol.
IBM CUA, from mainframe terminals to OS2. Later Geany and Sublime Text, recently VSCode.
Unix was earlier so didn’t get with the program. I limped along with nano and a subset of vim for years. Noticed “ne” about ten years ago, was ok.
Micro is a godsend and in the Ubuntu repos now. Debian too? Not sure.