Oh yeah, not all VGA games for sure, but a lot of adventures at the time went to scanned and downscaled art, lots of anti-aliased lines. I do love them too of course, but there's something really evocative about the lower pallete stuff I really like as well.
And 90s CRTs were plenty crisp! Especially at 320x200 like most games around then. I think 1024x768 was a pretty common desktop res on CRTs. When people talk about pixel art being designed for blurry monitors or with big scanlines, I think it's more console games on NTSC TVs.