In the terminals of yore — think cathodic ray tubes —, the cursor display and blinking was handled in hardware. It isn’t the case any more since many, many years. It’s now handled entirely in software. As far as I know, the Obsidian cursor is not handled by Obsidian itself but by the underlying editor framework, namely CodeMirror. It’s CodeMirror who made a design decision, while issuing version 6, that the cursor wouldn’t be controllable by CSS any more. I remember having read somewhere in release notes that this was supposed to spare some computing resources for editing and displaying text, thus also extending battery life on laptops and mobile devices. How many minutes of battery life you gain and whether it’s worth the price paid in visibility remains to be proven. But it may well be true that something is gained in responsiveness on some machines.
As someone who has to wear glasses to work with a display or read a book, I’m firmly in the camp of those who feel that too much was lost in commodity. Ninja Cursor, however imperfect, is a godsend for me.
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