alt Hacker NewsThis seems a bit focused on a specific era of pixel art games AND CRTs. For me, nostalgia was things like Master of Magic or Civilization 1/2, and I played those on CRTs attached to PCs, not in an arcade - the pixels absolutely did not blend together into rounded shapes due to fuzzy scan lines.
The article is about SD CRTs (480i for NTSC or 576i for PAL, or more commonly for games 240p/288p progressive scan using non-standard timing, often underscanned with pixels left unused in the borders).
VGA MS-DOS games usually ran at 320x200, but VGA CRTs supported up to 640x480 resolution. There was hardware line doubling from 200 lines up to 400 lines so you actually got two scanlines per pixel. It wasn't LCD sharp but the individual pixels were easily distinguishable. And lots of people played these game on SVGA CRTs so the pixels would be even sharper.