Carbonyl is surprisingly performant and usable, especially with --zoom=300 --bitmap
At lower resolutions, it would be nice to render images using a "subpixel" terminal rendering library like chafa (https://hpjansson.org/chafa/), or maybe sixels/kitty image protocol.
This is really, really cool!
Skia is a incredible abstraction layer. The linked article at the top of the OP https://fathy.fr/html2svg (2022) has some great graphics of how Skia can support various backends including PDF rendering (via https://skia.org/docs/user/sample/pdf/).
It's also worth noting that the Chrome Graphics team is writing yet another Skia rasterization backend, just announced last month: https://blog.chromium.org/2025/07/introducing-skia-graphite-...
Given that this article came out a couple years ago, it's quite possible that it was seen by the Chrome team and inspired them to look at making a new backend from scratch!
No need to render to ASCII/Unicode anymore!
brow.sh (firefox in the terminal) is still being updated though.
"Forking xterm to render graphical applications"