MiniLED (especially VA panels) has darker blacks and overall better contrast, unless you're playing in complete darkness. CRTs never had good contrast ratio in decently lit environment and all praises for CRT blacks were sang in the dark basements =P
But the local dimming feature is not perfect, because at best it's 2000 points of dimming for now, so expect blooming or some small contrast elements being darker that they should be. MiniLED may also lag a bit behind content, if it's not tuned right. It also has issues with crushed colors in SDR environment (similar to pushing LCD monitor contrast ratio way over default spec), because this feature is primarily targeted for 10-bit HDR content and contrast needs to be adjusted way down.

Overall, as an owner of 1000 zones MiniLED, I can say that playing Doom 3 is pleasant experience on such monitor. The difference between normal LCD and MiniLED is very noticeable. But let's be real, it's a compromise solution, designed for longevity and high HDR rating, not overall performance, if you really want true black - pick OLED.

As a matter of fact, most CRT’s also exhibit blooming. And I don’t mean just the phosphorus, but also the light of the phosphorus reflects against the glass layer and back to the phosphorus layer. So miniLED displays are quite nostalgic😉

You're confusing Mini with Micro.

MiniLED displays are simply LCD with an array of smaller LED backlights. That's all. They are just better LCDs.

MicroLED displays actually use the LEDs as pixels, similar to OLED. The advantage compared to OLED is that since it's not organic, it doesn't degrade in the same fashion, and there's no burn-in.

However, there is no consumer level MicroLED display, at least not any affordable ones. That might change in the next 3-6 years.

It still won't completely match CRT. It potentially can when it comes to brightness, contrast and perhaps response time, but not in resolution scaling, since it has a fixed hardware resolution, like LCD and OLED.

MicroLED will still wear, all the regular GaAs and whatever else material LEDs dim over time but the time it takes is longer that any of the organic types (this includes the widely available white LEDs), although by how much I am not sure. But as with organic types it is accelerated by temperature and current/brightness, and I think primary mechanism is electromigration which degrades the interface where light is output.

Well I did write "in the same fashion".

Degradation of non-organic LEDs is nowhere near as bad as OLEDs, and it should also stay much more uniform.

Every single piece of equipment degrades by use, even CRTs. What matters is how quickly and in what manner.

That was sort of a nitpick... The final effect is still same, reduced light output even if the exact mechanism of wear differs. But yeah, the how quickly is the main thing and it is dominated by how much current is passed which basically means "how bright" and the modern trend seems to be retina burning levels from factory conf (that many do not change from)... we'll see eventually how well they hold up when dialed in right once there's actually something to buy 🤣. Properly set up recent OLEDs seem to fare pretty well, my parents' one year old thing that sees 10+ hours a day seems not to show anything yet. Their 10 year old plasma that the OLED replaced, which was used 10h+ a day was definitely having station logos very clearly burned in 🤣. LCDs on the other hand have their backlights wear out unevenly, leading to darker or even discolored spots on the screen, sometimes even so straight from the box D:

As far as on-topic stuff goes, as said before, with miniLED one would be getting an LCD with much finer backlight zoning and what really matters is the exact type of panel since that determines viewing angles and motion performance. Input may support 144Hz or perhaps even more but the physics of the panel itself will not give you all of that and some perform better than others. OLED has much better response on this aspect and I would still be putting my money in one of those instead of any LCD based tech, especially on models with "black frame insertion", then it gets almost as good as a CRT. MicroLED with BFI would be in same position as OLED with potentially much better panel longetivity. As long as there's no image processing to mess up the incoming signal (one will have to get aquainted with all the offered modes, and hopefully there's a game mode that tends to turn off all the "unwanted" things), things can be very good ~

Thank you all for the information! It seems like we may never have a decent replacement for CRTs...

Overall OLED comes close if fixed resolution isn't a problem (and same with MicroLED once you can actually buy any), on a 4K panel there's more wiggle room for good scaling (now if the processors in the TVs themselves could put some effort into catering to our particular needs 🤣).

Laser scan based methods can come very close, and especially on the motion performance since the general way of perception of image will be similar. Ridiculously bright spot + presistence of vision makes sure there's no smear or other effects with stuff in motion, and it can achieve very high contrast ratios too. If not based on, DLP it can be free of native resolution too. Projection aspect is still a limiting factor for usability however... Direct view will always have an advantage here.