IMO, Suckless is about providing the minimal feature set possible. If you patch in an extra feature, that is what you get and nothing else. You always end up with exactly what you need and nothing more.
Compare this to software where you only ever use a subset of the features yet still have to pay the cost of features you don't use.
I don't feel like you really need scrolling on a terminal, just pipe to less or cat output to a file. It seems weird to me that people are going through large data sets on the terminal alone
It seems to me like base st is enough for pretty much every personal use case
If we stick to the strictest sense of the word, "need", then sure.
It does provide benefit, though. By being able to scroll I don't have to re-run the thing or juggle countless files if my recollection needs help.
Was that file on my machine or another, did I already delete it? Did it have sensitive information to mind? Nobody knows!
Of course one can make due with less, but I'd personally rather not.
It is odd for people at large to decide to apply patches for this. I'd hope someone would release it for others to benefit, or simply moving to something with a desirable feature set to start with.
I have been using a lightly customised dwm and st for the last 4 years with absolutely zero hassle. I spent a nice afternoon once to customize it and then that's it.
I must have spent an order of magnitude more time on my mac fighting with iterm the weird features that I sometimes trigger by mistake. And I am not talking even about the window manager....
Compare this to software where you only ever use a subset of the features yet still have to pay the cost of features you don't use.