Yes, I've confirmed that it's my favorite terminal emulator -- Terminology -- that's responsible for this better behavior, and not the DE. I've installed Terminology on all four Solus VMs, and it works perfectly on GNOME, MATE, and Plasma. There's a problem with Budgie (see below) but it does not appear to be DE related, except for Budgie.
If you've never used Terminology, I'd recommend giving it a try. The first time you launch it, it starts with a very small window, but you can resize it in the normal way. Then, press and hold the Ctrl key while you adjust the text size with the mouse wheel, until it's a comfortable size for you.
Right-click anywhere on the terminal window, and that will open the Options dialog, where you can set all sorts of options, like cursor type, text style, and whether to always start at the current size. Now shut Terminology down, and except for Budgie, the next time you start it, it will begin with the same window size and location, and the same text size that you set.
The Budgie problem might have a workaround, but I haven't tried it on a hardware installation, just the Budgie VM. I suspect it would be the same everywhere, because my VMs all use full HD (1920x1080) resolution. Here's what happens on the rest of the DEs:
At the very bottom of the Options window is a checkbox that determines whether these settings changes are to be just temporary, or you want them to apply the next time you start Terminology. It defaults to checked, meaning that Terminology will return to (most of) it's defaults when started agaiin. Be sure you UN-check that checkbox if you want it to remember your changes.
The problem is, Budgie uses a bigger text size for the Options window, so there's no way for you to see that checkbox. The top of that Options window is cut off, too, but that doesn't matter so much. Since there's no way to UN-check the Temporary checkbox, Terminology assumes that your changes should last only for the current session. Thus, it appears that it's not a Terminology problem, but a Budgie problem. Perhaps a workaround can be found, but I'll leave that up to someone who actually uses Budgie on a regular basis.
After lunch I'll repeat this test on Ultramarine Budgie and Ubuntu Budgie, to see if that's true of Budgie on distros other than Solus.
