It is now interesting that there are CRT shaders available for emulators. I just found a discussion about C64 CRT shader and people do share their preferences: https://www.lemon64.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=79062
I agree that it's super cool and super interesting, but it's also never going to be a true match. It's not as big a deal with CRT imho, but if you've ever seen a phosphorus vector-graphic display (such as used in older oscilloscopes or in the original Asteroids arcade cabinet), then you'll know what I mean. New displays can look absolutely amazing, and can emulate aspects of older displays, but I'm skeptical of current CRT emulation, and I've never seen a modern display that could emulate what happens with a phosphorus vector display.
This demo is tells me that we're relatively close already, and that HiDPI should eventually hit a spot where you could use pixels to represent the ion gun screen gaps and the bleed effect at the edge of subpixels.
