In what respect do you think CRTs had universally inferior image quality: viewing angles, contrast, brightness, gamut, color accuracy, spatial resolution, or something else?
Viewing angles are usually better, but there are LCDs with good enough viewing angles that in practice neither is a problem.
CRT contrast was markedly inferior at high spatial frequencies (as opposed to VESA contrast). The linked article is deliberately trying to simulate this. Even on aperture grille tubes this is obvious with pure white/black 50% ordered dither. This makes a big difference to legibility of text.
Brightness is lower than most LCDs, and fades quickly with age if it's set too high. Gamut is lower than high gamut LCDs, and color accuracy is similar to good LCDs.
Spatial resolution is much worse, especially as you can't benefit from sub pixel rendering. I've spent a lot of time tweaking CRT controls, and you can never get perfect focus and convergence across the whole screen. You can never get perfect geometry either, which is not an issue with LCDs.
Comparing a high end CRT to a high end image quality optimized LCD (eg. IPS or VA), viewing still images, from a normal desktop viewing position, I'm confident that the vast majority of viewers will prefer the LCD.
CRTs have significantly better motion and latency. The LCD ghosting problem is well-known, and while some more modern screen have minimized the problem, there can still be some ghosting errors depending on the input. Gamut doesn't matter when you have previous frames ghosting over thing
More importantly, LCDs buffer a least one frame. Many buffer 3-5 frames (!). This can be a serious problem playing for video games or other interactive uses if you need to rely on well under 100ms late4ncy. Rockband/GuitarHero is the canonical example of this problem, where they had to develop various types of adjustable latency compensation into the later games. Bad firmware can make this unpredictable, too; it is common for the firmware to select different algorithms based on the name of the input that you're using. (e.g. and LCD might buffer fewer frames if [[ $input_name =~ /game/ ]].
It's very common for LCDs to buffer, and if you're strobing then buffering at least one frame is required to prevent artifacts (although one frame at 144Hz is much less serious than one frame at 60Hz). However, there's nothing inherent in the technology that requires frame buffering and I've seen many benchmarks of LCDs with less than one frame of latency. If you look at high speed camera footage of LCDs you usually see them update with a CRT style raster scan:
I should clarify - I am speaking about the 60Hz LCDs found ~everywhere. Unfortunately, I cannot afford one of the newer fancier >60Hz models, and so I have little experience with them.
Once of the sources of multiple-frames of latency was the scaling/resampling stage that was needed to be compatible with non-native resolutions. Some of those algorithms are very slow. A friend of mine that makes FPGAs used in some LCDs has suggested that this slowness may be because the company making the monitor is too cheap to buy parts that were fast enough. That was a few years ago, though, so maybe these newer 144Hz monitors improved the situation.
CRT contrast was markedly inferior at high spatial frequencies (as opposed to VESA contrast). The linked article is deliberately trying to simulate this. Even on aperture grille tubes this is obvious with pure white/black 50% ordered dither. This makes a big difference to legibility of text.
Brightness is lower than most LCDs, and fades quickly with age if it's set too high. Gamut is lower than high gamut LCDs, and color accuracy is similar to good LCDs.
Spatial resolution is much worse, especially as you can't benefit from sub pixel rendering. I've spent a lot of time tweaking CRT controls, and you can never get perfect focus and convergence across the whole screen. You can never get perfect geometry either, which is not an issue with LCDs.
Comparing a high end CRT to a high end image quality optimized LCD (eg. IPS or VA), viewing still images, from a normal desktop viewing position, I'm confident that the vast majority of viewers will prefer the LCD.