(The character matrix in ROM is just 8 x 10, but pixels are stretched horizontally before being displayed. The limiting factor here isn't resolution, but the signal response of the screen phosphor and the circuits involved in its activation. Therefor the horizontal pixel stretch in order to allow the phosphor to reach its maximum activation level. In fact, a monochrome CRT has just an even phosphor coating and there isn't such a thing as hardware pixels or a native resolution. However, if activation phases are too short to allow the phosphor to gain a suitable activation, the display will be dim in those regions and overall unbalanced in brightness.)
The implicit claim is that somehow the machines for manufacturing punch cards were reused for computer output and that is what terminals were trying to emulate. But surely there were more displays and non-card-sized printers?
There certainly were non card size printers - but they scaled linearly with technology
But no we didn't repurpose card punches to be terminals, but we did need terminals to edit card images (fortran was 72 characters plus 8 digits of sequence numbers)
It was readable, but not something for your default setting - 10 mins was more than enough!
A CRT doesn't have to have resolution in the sense of pixels per inch (although many of them do). However "resolution" is a more general limit on how far away two distinct points can be.
A discrete grid of pixels imposes one kind of limit. But another kind of limit is that two slightly fuzzy dots will become indistinguishable if they blur into one another sufficiently.