A brand new tape with a commercial release on it was pretty good quality. It went straight from master to VHS. But in the early days of VCRs new tapes and movies were too expensive for most people so everyone shared copies of stuff. Watch a copy of a copy of a copy on VHS and that's when the real wackiness starts. Each analog copy generation gets worse and worse.

And I've never seen a shader remotely as bad as a VCR losing sync with the tape :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nm6qzQGTBPc

I think it would be difficult to even reproduce the bad quality of the pirated version of Terminator we watched as kids. With regard to this I think the shaders would need to be more dynamic.

It's like that webcomic where the guy complains he has a fetish for JPEG artifacts because he grew up downloading porn in the 90s...

Personally I don't understand it. Pixel art looks way better crisp than blurred to hell with fake scanlines and a TV bulge, and I lived through that era

Probably a difference in the screens used. Like I'll play an old videogame on a modern screen and it'll look substantially worse than it looked on a CRT.

Most people who attempt this effect don't have a reference CRT. They don't realize that the scan lines bleed and become fuzzy on the screen and are not perfect lines like the shader makes.

released videos were made to be more resistant to interference

recordable VHSes for home use needed to be editable without mastering equipment, so they are more subject to deterioration