We were fine watching movies on VHS tapes and small CRT TVs, but watching a high-quality encoding on a 4k TV is much better.

Analog on the order of 480i60 is a good bit different from even digital 640x480p60.

However it's a lossy compression of sorts, and the transform is of a different nature than we're now used to estimating for digital codecs.

I think there's a bit of rose tinted glasses going on with our memories of SD TV, too. A decade or so ago I plugged an old PS2 into my 50" plasma TV (which I bought just after plasma TVs got suddenly cheap :D ) and then spent a good 10-15 minutes trying to find a setting to increase the resolution before realising that, no, that's just how things looked back then, except now it's magnified so it's really blurry.