> "European" Commodore 64 with PAL was actually a few percent slower than an American C64 with NTSC. And other crazy things like that.

Indeed! Even in the Playstation 2 era, many games still ran at different speeds in Europe than the U.S. and Japan. There were so many legacy artifacts which haunted computers, games, DVDs and more for decades after analog broadcast was supplanted by digital. And it all arose from the fact the installed base and supporting broadcast infrastructure of analog television was simply too massive to replace. In a way it was one of the biggest accrued "technical debts" ever!

The only regrettable thing is during the long, painful transition from analog to digital, a generation of engineers got the idea that the original analog TV standard was somehow bad - which, IMHO, is really unfair. The reality is the original RS-170 standard was a brilliant solution which perfectly fulfilled, and even exceeded, all its intended use cases for decades. The problems only arose when that solution was kept alive far beyond its intended lifetime and then hacked to support new use cases like color encoding while maintaining backward compatibility.

Analog television was created solely for natural images captured on vacuum tube cameras. Even the concept of synthetic imagery like character generator text and computer graphic charts was still decades in the future. Then people who weren't yet born when TV was created, began to shove poorly converted, hard-edged, low-res, digital imagery into a standard created to gracefully degrade smooth analog waveforms and it indeed sucked. I learned to program on an 8-bit computer with 4K of RAM connected to a Sears television through an RF modulator. Even 32 columns of 256x192 text was a blurry mess with color fringes! On many early 8-bit computers, some colors would invert randomly based on which clock phase the computer started on! Red would be blue and vice versa so we'd have to repeatedly hit reset until the colors looked correct. But none of that craziness was the fault of the original television engineers, we were abusing what they created in ways they couldn't have imagined.