I think CRTs let your brain do some antialiasing so free details. I have some old 600mb divx rips that still look pretty damn good when viewed on a CRT.
You can use different look up tables in a JPEG image and Mozilla did this to make JPEGs work for digital screens where there isn't that blurring for free.
The Mozilla encoder went way over most people's heads and the default JPEGturbo algorithm most operating systems and applications use is from the CRT era when compute cycles cost thousands more than they do today.
CRTs also smoothed out details on screen, it was a shock for TV world going from standard resolution 4:3 CRT to 16:9 Digital Full HD because analog TV had this wonderful way of magically hiding scratches in a set so long as you threw tens of kilowatts of light at everything in the studio. With digital the sets had to be rebuilt because everything looked shabby.
Your brain helps too, but in the same way that it helps with every color display device that uses RGB or some variant. Get close enough and you can perceive the individual phosphors or subpixels in either case.
Looking at them side by side, I somewhat preferred the blur/bloom of the nano‑texture glass, perhaps due to retro CRT nostalgia. At 5K it's still incredibly crisp compared to 1x pixels (e.g. 27" 1440p).
(But… for looking at code/text all day in a room without ambient lighting problems, I chose the crisp image of the plain (antireflective-coated) glass instead)
The magic is that it looks soft on a CRT. soft != blurry
In my experience a simple scanline filter surprisingly helps in softening upscaled low res. The draw back is that the overall brightness is reduced.
You can't win with LCD.