Pleased you weren't bashing the venerable CRT - I loved them.
You are though forgetting that we benefitted from having PAL here in the Uk (and in most of Europe) which is 625 lines.
Philips Pixel Plus increased that to 833 lines, and doubled the horizontal resolution, and the result is really damned close to full HD long before it was put on the market - not just a little better.
Seeing is believing - they were amazing sets, at the peak of CRT development - everything after that was about penny-pinching.