While there are some terrible masters, a decent one holds it up well; there are plenty of DVDs that play at 16:9 480p cleanly, and a similarly letterboxed VHS might have been 170p with lots of chroma noise.
If S-VHS had ever caught on for commercial releases, then the jump might have been smaller, but a VHS was visibly worse even on screens of the time, and screens were getting bigger pretty fast back then.
If S-VHS had ever caught on for commercial releases, then the jump might have been smaller, but a VHS was visibly worse even on screens of the time, and screens were getting bigger pretty fast back then.