It used to, back in The Day, when you had hard-copy consoles or even dot matrix printers. I think sending CR (but not LF) and then printing accents over top of the original line was a way of printing some European languages with just ASCII.

  $ man terminfo | grep cursor_down | head -1
         cursor_down                   cud1       do        down one line
  $ tput cud1 | hexdump -C | cut -f 1-20 | head -1
  00000000  0a                                                |.|
  $ man terminfo | grep carriage_return | head -1
         carriage_return               cr         cr        carriage return (P*)
  $ tput cr | hexdump -C | cut -f 1-20 | head -1
  00000000  0d                                                |.|

If you ever write a bash script that does more advanced things with the terminal, you'll get familiar with tput, termcap and terminfo pretty quickly.

It does in ASCII, and (consequently) in any ANSI-conforming terminal [emulator].