I'm actually horrified to see stretching on the rise, especially in news broadcasts. "Oh, this singer just died? Let's have a disfiguring retrospective of their 80s music videos where they appear 2x as wide now."
That reminds me of how TV stations in the 70s would play cartoons formatted for movie screens and just squash them down to the 4:3 aspect ratio. I didn't understand why at the time, but I suppose it's better than editing out a huge chunk of the material. It's less disrespectful to the material than what they do today, even if it looked awful.