Before applying for my first "real" job as a C++ developer I already worked on some projects with C++ but I had nothing to show. The code I wrote was either lost, in unrepresentative student projects or couldn't be published because it was owned by my first employer where I was a working student. So when I was asked to give a small sample of some C++ code I've written I needed to come up with a tiny project which could be used to demonstrate some proficiency with C++.
Although the project itself was nothing special it showed me that the terminal can be sufficient to render basic UI. Rendering a TUI (terminal user interface) is easy enough so that you don't have to involve any fancy frameworks in order to see what you are doing. This also lead me to implement a terminal version of tetris written in Rust called tet-rs.
Overall I highly encourage you to write a little game with a TUI if you want to get your feet wet with programming.