Isn't "fill in the gaps" the point? What exactly does a polygon character make a person imagine? Text like "He was a nefarious looking character dressed all in red" takes a very small amount of bytes but the resulting payload in someone's mind can be huge. I guess you could argue that images might be a better mechanism to transmit someone else's imagination but text is better to activate your own and I think that is what the quote was about.
There's undoubtedly an appeal to exercising one's own imagination. But any text based interface locks off a huge amount of options for interaction. You'll never have a racing Game, a shooter, a flight simulator, any kind of visual puzzles, etc. in a text based game. The constraints are enormous and there's little question as to why there are so few text based games today. And those few that do exist and are popular like Dwarf Fortress, Tales of Maj'Eyal, Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead, etc. all support graphical tiles.
And how did you aim the reticule against your opponents in this checkered paper game? Gameplay ran in realtime? I'm sure you mean to say that you created a pen and paper game that had shooting as an element, but backed by some kind of dice roll. This is conforms to what I said were the constraints of text based games: graph or grid based worlds with turn based or pseudo turn based simulation. Shooters in these kinds of games do exist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/722730/Cogmind/ but they exhibit the same constraints I mentioned
