Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have both, and while btop can look nice, has some templates to cycle through, it lacks things I'm using in htop: s for stracing, l for listing open files, and x for which of them are locked. It also has some templates to cycle through, and can be made to look nice, too. That thing about the resource usage? A few MB more residential? Oh noez! (Maybe depends on compilation options) Only thing coming to mind are too f…
Timelines are by no means a gimmick. Out of the box, btop has good rendering of key metrics .. htop does too, but btop is easier to read in a console (imho). Nothing cyber about it. “Ooh cyber” is a lame straw man but hey, you had to make it. Btop is pretty and has good defaults for many things. A performance monitor is not a good interface to strace, nor is it a good replacement for lsof, nn, arp, etc.
The way I'm using it, somewhat customized from the defaults, showing some more, but mainly still showing the process-tree as the largest field...
... I navigate by either arrow-keys or mouse, mark the process, and apply another view of that process with one keypress, be it the default output of strace for that process, or the default of lsof applied to it.
Why should I have to type more than that, when that's enough in most cases?
The same would apply to netstat/ss for that process if htop would support that.
IMO that's a rather comfortable way around all the pids, p(s)kills and whatnot else.
Call me lazy, but after decades of *nix I really don't care anymore ;->