"If you're talking about PAL, which came later, quite good arguments can
be made that it's not better at all; just that its weaknesses are in
different places."

Well for one they eliminated the phase control. On US sets it was called the tint or hue control and it shifted the phase of either the chroma subcarrier or the oscillator. Their little scheme cancelled out the errors, which were mainly caused by poor frequency response which would shift the phase of the burst or even make the PLL in the TV have a phase error because part of the burst is cut off. However it happened, you sometimes needed to adjust the tint in the old days.

Also, PAL was more lines. I think it was 50 Hz which would mean they needed a longer persistence phosphor. Also the horizontal rate was faster. They had quite a bit more resolution bt at the cost of frame rate.

But that can be dealt with, you know movies in the theaters only used to be 24 frames per second right ? Well people did not really have a problem with that. They only reason it is a problem with a CRT is because the picture is drawn in a series of lines and that makes it more visible. A film projector is a whole different animal than a TV set.