I’m having this same issue – none of the examples change the TFT on my Wio Terminal.
I have found that if I do
digitalWrite(LCD_BACKLIGHT, HIGH);
Then I can at least get the LCD to turn on. (Without that, it is always completely off.) However, the screen only displays what was last written to it.
If I add something like a Serial.println() to the setup, I can see that in the serial console. But no changes to the screen ever show up.
If I load up the CircuitPython bootloader, though, that works fine, as the original poster had mentioned.