I'm not writing this to disregard the PDF author—it's just a personal retrospective.

I'm a 50-year-old Japanese person who watched the original Dragon Ball broadcast on TV around 40 years ago. Back then, there were no LCDs or OLEDs—only CRT ("brown tube") TVs, and the signal was analog. With that kind of analog rendering, it was practically impossible to tell what the "true" colors were. Plus, CRT displays degraded over time, shifting colors toward brown.

The pre-processed raw images in the article actually look like what I remember as the real Dragon Ball colors.