I think the framebuffer devices is a least common denominator that is available on even miniscule or emulated hardware whilst anything above thats starts requiring a whole lot more infrastructure.

And honestly, you don't need much more for an image viewer.

This is exactly right - you can get a framebuffer on just about anything, including pretty much any video card made since about 1990, and also more fun things like the little i2c display that your toaster has. No need to restrict relatively simple software like fbi/fim to running on less hardware by using drm.

I used to play videos with the framebuffer just fine and read PDF's with fbpdf2, among watching TV with fbtv and the like. I didn't miss nearly anything, as most games under SDL1/2 can render into FB with

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=fbcon 

or

      export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=kmsdrm

And tons of games too, such as Supertux2, Crispy Doom, SDLQuake, FreeCiv-SDL...

another fun one if you're in an exotic situation and don't have a framebuffer (or if you just want to have some fun by making your games to look worse):

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=aalib

unfortunately it's only SDL1, though

export SDL_VIDEODRIVER=caca is more usable for games

Oh nice! How did I not know it works with caca?!

Works pretty well even. I wish there was a libchafa variant, and ideally for SDL2.

I've even played SC2, The Ur-Quan masters fairly successfully in an ssh session that way. And Frozen Bubble.

This is what I meant: kmsdrm.

I shudder when I read DRM after building a embedded display raspberry pi build. There was a problem with Raspberry pi kernel incorrectly detected an HDMI display was connected even though I was trying to display to DSI. The only work around I had was to write a kernel module that would disable HDMI as a possible interface.