I found a report of a similar thing happening once before on Ubuntu: https://github.com/racket/racket/issues/4169
The issue there was that libncurses-dev was not installed while Racket was being built. Racket's build system apparently checks for the presence of the ncurses headers and then disables certain features if it can't find those. I don't know enough about the Debian build system to see if that's what's happening here, but it might be a good starting point.
