One interesting point of reference is the initial switch to HD in the 2000s; I remember there was a bit of panic in the beginning because news studios had to adjust studio lighting and makeup; flaws that were not perceptible on a CRT were all of a sudden extremely noticeable blown up on a 48" flatscreen.
Higher resolution, better color replication, and frame rate make very obvious the fact that there seems to be a magical glowing orb following around the characters right behind the camera. Immersion breaking because you can get away with it with less quality, it's more difficult to notice.
Something that I've also found more and more irritating is the foley artists doing ridiculous things for sound effects, especially in nature documentaries, but all over the place really.
ex: Farscape - all the CG was rendered in low res, so even when you view a 1080p copy it looks silly. Imagine all the content that would have to be re-done and upscaled to make it watchable in 4k.
Nowadays people open up koi pond videos on phones and let their cats play with it. But like you mentioned, it would be interesting to see a study on it.
My point is: CRT did show a lot more colours, had much lower latency, and did not have a grid where you could see individual pixels.
No colour banding, no lag and no screen door effect. That really enhanced the content you saw when you had a CRT.
During that era, 640x480 video was the common high end.
Occasionally things will be slightly out of focus, but it wasn’t apparent on a SD CRT so they shot the scene. On an HD screen you can see it and it’s kind of distracting.