I think CRTs let your brain do some antialiasing so free details. I have some old 600mb divx rips that still look pretty damn good when viewed on a CRT.
You can use different look up tables in a JPEG image and Mozilla did this to make JPEGs work for digital screens where there isn't that blurring for free.
The Mozilla encoder went way over most people's heads and the default JPEGturbo algorithm most operating systems and applications use is from the CRT era when compute cycles cost thousands more than they do today.
CRTs also smoothed out details on screen, it was a shock for TV world going from standard resolution 4:3 CRT to 16:9 Digital Full HD because analog TV had this wonderful way of magically hiding scratches in a set so long as you threw tens of kilowatts of light at everything in the studio. With digital the sets had to be rebuilt because everything looked shabby.