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I'm not following why would software still be inferior playback to now ancient hardware? Isn't that sort of like suggesting digital can't replay a vinyl record transcoded to digital as well?

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No, I'm thinking of proprietary hardware or software in the decks that perform tbc, noise reduction, filtering of artifacts, etc. If given a choice of a perfect copy of a spotty VHS and all the virtualdub and avisynth filters, or the mpeg2 output from a JVC SR-MV50, my experience has been that the latter is better. However, I grant that a video preservation professional might get better results from treating a direct capture than I.

Sort of correct - except that the software to reliably decode VHS took some time to get right, and there still are regular improvements to the vhs-decode github repo.

For a long time a great S-VHS deck, professional Time-Base-Corrector and so on from a TV studio, was the better option over vhs-decode software, especially on bad tapes. But now, I'd go with vhs-decode any day.

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