They would be $248 adjusted for inflation. But those tiny home computers came without a screen, hard disk, networking, a real OS, or pretty much anything we take for granted today. That $400 laptop packs in a ton of tech.
Composite (and, later on, S-video) outputs were common on third-party CGA, EGA, and (S)VGA cards (not sure if official IBM ones did, but third party were more common.) Also, I think that Tandy’s quite popular proprietary graphics did. And VGA to composite, component, and S-Video adapters were all readily available, too.
And later, this shifted to HDMI being common for both video cards and TVs; the ability to use your TV as a PC display never went away, though TVs couldn't handle (until the HD era) the higher resolution modes used for text and later graphics (though it wasn't until SVGA that that became an issue for most games, which tends to favor higher color offer higher resolution modes.)
Before that, you could either get a "scan converter" which would convert VGA into composite video, or a specialty monitor which was typically a 27" or 32" CRT TB capable of synching to 640x480 VGA.
When flat-panel TVs started coming out they typically had a VGA or DVI port, and shortly thereafter HDMI, so it became moot.
I don't understand why it's so hard for companies to build 4k dumb TVs. If anything it should be easier and cheaper to not include a bunch of smarts, right?