Notably, pixel art has been developed for and played on LCD screens since 1989 with the Gameboy.
Including the entire Pokémon series until its move to 3D, as well as many ports and continuations of older “pixel art” series originating on the NES/SNES.
The blockiness wasn’t exaggerated, of course, but there wasn’t any CRT magic obfuscating it either, so that would change later generations’ experience of the medium.
For Gameboy, Game Gear, GBC and GBA in particular there's pixel art and graphical effects that are often designed in mind for the characteristics of the LCDs in those handhelds. The slow pixel response is used to fake more shades of grey/colour and fonts in games for the GBC/GBA often lean heavily on the subpixel arrangement that ends up making them look much worse if you simply scale the pixels up. As a result most modern emulators have features that emulate the LCD panels as well.
It looks absolutely godawful on an emulator since without the ghosting what remains is a high amount of flickering.
People taking the gameboy as an example of crisp pixels have either
1/ never had a real gameboy in their hands
2/ putting on nostalgia goggles, hard
The original gameboy LCDs were nothing like what people have today. They had so many limitations and quirks and they were all used in game development, or at the very least, taken into account while designing the games so that things like animations would look decent. Pixels could never look crisp when in motion on an LCD of that era. Not even the early PC monitors.
When people are comparing CRTs vs LCDs, they're thinking of today's LCDs which show a very sharp, high resolution, high contrast image. That's definitely not what a GB had.
On the GBA and GBA SP screen, pure on/off flickering every frame does not perfectly fake transparency, but it gets very close. On the AGS101 or NDS Lite screen, it looks a lot worse.
I recall being able to start an old game in our school computer lab back in 2003 or so. Its default resolution was 320×200, while we had screens set to 1024x768 there.
