Let's not discount the years since 1997 when people actually did play retro games on high resolution computer monitors, with big chunky pixels.
Including the entire Pokémon series until its move to 3D, as well as many ports and continuations of older “pixel art” series originating on the NES/SNES.
The blockiness wasn’t exaggerated, of course, but there wasn’t any CRT magic obfuscating it either, so that would change later generations’ experience of the medium.
https://youtu.be/MytSySMUwv8?t=2892
It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.
The NDS lite screen does have sharp crisp pixels.
> modern, blocky pixel art often is a kind of misdirected, anachronistic nostalgia.
All of _my_ pixel art nostalgia comes from the 240x160px LCD Game Boy Advance and crystal clear blocky 16x16 sprites.