It depends. A large movie - yes. But many movies were made with less of a focus on the cinema and more on the video rental ("direct-to-video") or TV syndication.

TV content like Star Trek the Next generation were definitely never meant to display in high definition, and such things can show in props etc.

TNG is famous for being shot on 35mm film. Because of this, it had a higher "definition" than most other television productions and was able to be very well remastered for later releases, with some wonkyness around reshooting/remaking a lot of visual effects that had not been done on film.

Yes, no argument there. Many shows were shot on film and it made a big difference even back in the SDTV days, because electronic cameras just weren't any good. It wasn't only about resolution. There were electronic cameras with great horizontal resolution, but the look was still very "cheap" with blown highlights, muddy colors etc.

Another famous example is Friends, also shot on 35mm film. It has the advantage over Star The Next Generation is that the props in Friends are actual, real life things, so if we now see the fine details of something, we just sea a teapot a little better. While the prop in Star Trek has a higher risk of looking like that duct taped PVC pipe it is rather than the SciFi ray gun it portrays.

Or say, that one actress in the pool scene where you see her from behind nude and, in low definition, nothing could be seen. Once they upscaled it, things were... more visible.

So pedantic. Can you access the original film? What is a VHS?

Do you or kstrauser make films? Please enlightening me more on the nuances of personal preference?

Personal preference is fine! Describing VHS as “periodic accurate” as though that was these films’ original format is the silly bit.

Silly to you. Again, to you.

Since the film does not run in theaters indefinitely and at the time VHS was a common format, among others.

Given film reciprocity and resolution related to period produced film stock and processing techniques, VHS and other reduced resolution formats from the same period, look better, to me! than rescans(4k, which super35 barely supports) and up-resing. Again IMHO because I guess people take this otherwise.

So I guess you just never watch movies from before 1980 or so?

I own equipment capable of view films and plates from any period of film production. I have processed and looked at found "film" from before 1900. I use quotes because it wasnt the same as today and many varieties of techniques existed to capture images or make moving images.