Well, the notion that there’s a single UI that will suit everyone is a fantasy. Really, what we want is a display that’s flexible enough that the player can adjust it to suit their own preferences.
So as well as “Classic Infocom” style, e.g. those with screen readers could select “single window” which even dispenses with the header bar (printing it in the main window each turn.)
Or those playing on a phone (where screen real estate is even scarcer) could split the output into screens on different tabs. So you’d have the “actions” tab, (the old main window) which reports the results of actions, the “room descriptions” tab (and why shouldn’t the player be able to scroll back through all the visited rooms? This would let them scroll back and check stuff: “Yeah, the statue in the library is the archchancellor’s nephew, not the actual dude himself!”) and inventory in another tab, and so on.
I don’t see a problem with “stateful” images or descriptions not updating to match the game’s current state: the scrollback represents the player’s memory of what they’ve encountered so far. (Like an in-game notebook you don’t have to implement.)
But having said all that, I’m definitely the flea standing on the shoulders of giants, here. I’m happy when I get to increase the text size without having to diddle with config files!