Pong was absolutely NOT boring. Terrible clickbait title.
edit: If you wanted to answer the question "which is more boring, football(soccer) or baseball" you'd ask people their opinion, rather than call one of them more boring based on the complexity of the rules/playing field/number of players/etc.
It's completely subjective (though a fact about everyone, nobody, or somewhere specific between finding something boring can be objective if taken from a good poll or whatever).
Even many baseball fans would say baseball is more boring, as soccer is designed to be 90 minutes of pure action while baseball is designed to spend much of the time waiting for the next pitch. People can like the "boring" thing more.
Similarly, pinball was designed to be exciting with a bunch of fancy lights and sounds. Comparatively, early pong showed nothing but the two paddles and a ball and could make one sound. It was boring, people still loved it and sank thousands of hours in.
Pinball machines may have many more elements to them, they may be more eye catching, but to somebody who doesnt enjoy playing pinball at all it's still incredibly boring to them. Someone who enjoys it probably isn't finding it boring, or at least not more boring than doing nothing.
Yes football has more actual playing time and takes 90 (well, closer to 110 after half time and added time) minutes compared to baseball's often hours, yes footballers walk/run an average of 3-4x further in a game on average than baseball players.... and yes, some baseball fans will think football is less boring (I'm one of them! I like baseball but far less than football)..., but to somebody who loves baseball and hates football, football is the more boring one. And they're not wrong, nor am I for thinking baseball is more boring. It's just subjective.
Your comparison for "most boring" really only applies to somehow who has a quick look at both things, maybe in an art gallery, then moves on having found one of them less boring than the other. Not to people who actually played and enjoyed one or both of them.
> And yet as a Gen-Xer born too late to have enjoyed Pong as a child, I have trouble fathoming how anyone could sit in front of a TV watching a square dot—not even a round ball—bounce back and forth across the dark, featureless screen. Was this really fun?
Pong is enjoyable today for the same reason that IRL table tennis is still enjoyable today, and the reason isn't the graphical fidelity of the paddles and ball (in either case).