Good point, buy an old CRT in addition to the DVD player!

My BluRay player automatically upsamples DVDs. It's far from perfect but it looks pretty good most of the time.

Not sure if that's common to BluRay players or not.

In TFA they specify that it was also blu ray. This person was using DVD as an (incorrect) term meaning "some kind of plastic disc."

Though they don't say 4k/UHD blu-ray which would be a big miss if not. UHD blu-ray is superior to any other format in terms of quality. Perhaps excepting a few very niches streaming services that are tied to expensive hardware.

I'd happily sacrifice some pixels to avoid the aggressive DNR and hack 16:9 crop treatments typical of streaming re-releases.

It's often better than a 5 Mbps 1080p

I've found cartoons look fine if the format matches your display.