>The best pixel art is carefully crafted to convey the impression of an image of much higher resolution than the actual pixels.
This is the kind of thing I'm arguing against. The "best" pixel art doesn't not convey what a higher resolution picture does. It conveys the important stuff and leaves the mind to interpolate the rest. You can do the same with high resolution art, as has been done in anime since forever. Leave noses off, don't draw lines between teeth, etc.
The article you linked, and the article about CRT filters are both over-cited and missing the big picture. (FFS, if the guy who "quit pixel art" knew what made it good, he wouldn't have had to quit it and publish a whiney article about how everyone else doesn't appreciate it.)
Good pixel art isn't good because someone designed it for a specific output or because it mimics high res art. It's not good because it blurs well on a CRT. It's good because it conveys something the observer can relate to and understand, just like any other art. The low resolution means that you have a medium which expects you to convey what is important from a distance and with a palette which allows ambiguity. Which is a major boon if that's what you're trying to do. (For instance, to avoid projecting a characters' emotions onto the player and instead let the player interpret their own emotions in the art.)
And the CRT article also manages to assert -- without any evidence whatsoever -- that the designer of old games made good art because they purposefully accounted for rendering on a CRT, rather than the equally likely possibility that this was an accident and that they were simply designing art within constraints that required them to choose what they really wanted to convey at the expense of other features. AKA, that they were just good artists regardless of medium.