You have very valid points, variation in CRTs was very high back in the day, and the example image does have a gamma/brightness discrepancy, I agree with that. Back when CRTs were dominant, gamma and brightness were all over the map, almost nobody knew what those were. You couldn’t even count on where the visible edges of the screen were. And you’re right that saying “the way it was intended” is perhaps slightly hyperbolic or maybe isn’t quite meant the way you’re taking it. It’s not that using CRTs or not was a choice, but it is fair to say artists used CRTs when creating game art and intended for it to look as good as it could on CRTs, and they did not intend for the pixels to turn into multi-pixel solid color blocks.

Yes exactly CRTs were blurrier, and that alone affects artistic choices. It is fair to say that CRT art looks different than LCD art because CRTs are blurrier. Games developed on CRTs with low resolutions don’t look as good when displayed on high res LCDs with up-resing and nearest neighbor sampling. The problem with using a solid 2x2, 3x3, 4x4 block of LCD pixels to represent a low res CRT pixel is that it’s a poor reconstruction, introduces unwanted high frequencies, and looks very different from the original. It’s true from a signal processing perspective that 4-up LCD reconstruction of old CRT art is quite wrong and bad.

This does extend into music, kinda. We can look at music from the 30s and 50s for an even stronger example - early recorded music was both technically limited to, and also artistically designed for, a frequency range of, I don’t know, like 500-3k Hz. Some audiophiles do argue that using an old record player to play old vinyl is a superior experience to listening to a digitized copy on modern hardware, and often with the same argument - that the old stuff is the way it was intended to be heard.

However, the analogy to music is slightly broken since today’s digital music - unlike LCD up-resing of old games - never tried to reconstruct old music using nearest neighbor sampling. When you do that with audio, you can instantly hear it’s all wrong. If you were actually comparing nearest-neighbor audio reconstruction to blurry reconstruction, you would 100% agree that the blurry reconstruction was the ‘way it was intended to be heard’. The biggest problem with this whole argument that neither you nor the parent addressed is that LCD nearest-neighbor reconstruction is crappy, and as long as we try to blur when using LCDs, most of this discussion is moot.

So anyway, in many ways I think your argument already does agree with the idea that games designed on CRTs look better on CRTs than, e.g., 4-up reconstructions on LCDs. The entire sticking point in your argument might hinge on how you interpret the word “intended”. I’m saying the original argument isn’t necessarily claiming that the intent was conscious or explicit, it’s merely saying that the intent was a byproduct of having used CRTs during the creation process. In that sense, it’s a valid argument.