Unless you disable cursor blinking because you find it annoying (like I do).

Yeah, disabling cursor blinking is the first configuration I do in any terminal.

I mean a trivial solution to all of these work around a could have been each keystroke registers a single asterisk that goes away after a delay. You wouldn't reveal the length and you'd had a standard way of informing the user that their keystroke was registered.

It doesn’t tell you if backspace works, however.