That may be a different story because PAL TV sets never had them. NTSC
sets needed them because the phase of the color carrier wandered and
often shifted to the green, while PAL sets reset the phase each line
and
therefore were always "correct".

NTSC does not, and never had, an inherent problem with phase stability.

I cant conclude anything, but I know 2 things:
1. NTSC is widely known as Never The Same Color twice
2. The PAL system includes measures to counter phase shift causing
colour issues, so I can only conclude that the system engineers
thought this was a problem with NTSC.

I don't have the time to discuss this at length, but NTSC's unfortunate
reverse-acronym was the result of poor studio standards, and is not inherent
in the system. PAL incorporated phase alternation to partly compensate for
transmission problems (non-linear group delay) in Europe.


And fwiw, IIUC PAL rendered colours are designed to alternate the
error line after line rather than get each line colour correct, so
like many such measures it usually solves the problem, but not always.

Correct. That's why color errors roughly cancelled out, at the expense of
loss of satruation.