The best CRTs may have been
ok but most CRTs in the history of their kind were not what you describe. I've seen and used my share of them over many decades. Even in the 2000s any of the hundreds of CRTs in an office would have been rather characterized by some CRT glow ruining the contrast particularly around text, constantly needing focus and geometry adjustments if yours was fancy enough to offer the option, commonly 60Hz but somehow always flickering, a bulging screen, in time weird color distortions or fading in some corner of the screen that never went away, the inevitable scratch of the antiglare coating, peaking at 1080i resolution if you were willing to sell your aunt for it, the fine stabilizing wires from the aperture grill creating OCD triggering shadows, huge but still realistically limited to 24-32" screen (in reality most were still huge but only 15-17"), hernia inducing heavy, and above 32" gave your dolly a hernia (300lbs worth), hard to adjust ergonomically, likely some buzzing noise, dust magnets, the smell of overheated plastic and dust being burned off the tube, and I'll stop here before it starts looking like CRTs stole my girlfriend and spit in my coffee.
Don't get me wrong, that smell will always take me back to a time when I had hair and it will without a doubt put a happy smile on my face any day. But it's all nostalgia anchored by a couple of technical advantages that pale in the face of overall tech today.
