You're right. I used glow before creating leaf, and the more I used it, the more I found myself wanting features like a persistent TOC, search, watch mode, and mouse support.
That led me to build leaf as a more GUI-like Markdown reader for the terminal.
Recently, an inline mode (leaf --inline) was added for users who prefer the simpler glow-style experience.
https://github.com/RivoLink/leaf