> I’ve never seen good CRT physical emulation.

Same. Because they all try way too hard.

I have a fully working vintage arcade cab from the mid eighties which I still play on. I know. Most of these shaders and techniques exaggerate way too much what things really looked like. There's a tiny blur and there are tiny scanlines (or whatever these little black lines are called) but things... Mostly looks pixelated.

And that's an old, used, CRT I have: probably one of the blurriest one. Back in the nineties we already had fancy Sony Trinitron CRTs and these were flawless. Pixels just looked like pixels, not like all these blurred things nor like all these exaggerated shaders. Many CRTs were really crisp.

Do games from the eighties look better on a CRT? Definitely. But it was subtle.

Pixel art is pixel art and it's not pixel art because it was shown on a CRT and suddenly it wouldn't be pixel art anymore because it's shown on a modern monitor.

Things were really just "blocky" and pixelized. That's really how things looked.