I share the same opinion as the author. That said, it's also important to remember that the display devices of the time were different than they are now and the sharp pixelated textures we see now would look a bit different on a CRT from that period. The sharp, gritty look that he (and I) admire would have been just a little fuzzier back then.

A tiny bit fuzzier but not in a way that mattered back then. If you're running a software renderer it could well have been at 320x200 and on any monitor that comes out still looking pretty much like an LCD display, with slight blending on the edges technically but still large, large pixels not being blended. Even at 640x480 there was noticeable blockiness not being blended away. Monitors were designed to be sharper than the televisions the consoles were outputting to. Software rendering at anything high enough to be blended looking was a slideshow.

Unless you were playing on a TV CRT, I don't think so. PC monitors of the time were pretty sharp already.