tl;dr: Modern "pixel art" often looks overly blocky not just because CRTs added fuzziness, but because artists have abandoned techniques like dithering, anti-aliasing, and careful palette selection that made old graphics look good on any display. The CRT-smoothing narrative is also overstated: late-era CRTs and RGB monitors showed pixels quite crisply, and the "fuzz" people remember mostly came from cheap TVs using RF or composite signals. Aspect ratio mismatches (non-square CRT pixels vs. square modern ones) also distort how old art appears today.