Nope, that's not it.
It's mostly because he noticed the majority of terminal applications were okay but not great. So he decides to address this by creating a cross-platform terminal app that's faster and more compatible than pretty much every existing terminal app. And has a native macOS UI written in Swift without compromising its cross-platform features.
Kind of out of nowhere, Ghostty is in the conversation of being the best terminal app available. "Best" doesn't mean the most features; but it nails speed and compatibility. (I’d love to see iTerm switch to using libghostty in the near future. That would be a killer combination!)
From "State of Terminal Emulators in 2025: The Errant Champions": [1]
Before presenting the latest results, Ghostty warrants particular attention, not only because it scored the highest among all terminals tested, but that it was publicly released only this year by Mitchell Hashimoto. It is a significant advancement. Developed from scratch in Zig, the Unicode support implementation is thoroughly correct
In 2023, Mitchell published Grapheme Clusters and Terminal Emulators, demonstrating a commitment to understanding and implementing the fundamentals. His recent announcement of libghostty provides a welcome alternative to libvte, potentially enabling a new generation of terminals on a foundation of strong Unicode support.
[1]: https://www.jeffquast.com/post/state-of-terminal-emulation-2...