I agree. The upscaled version is both more smoothed and more mottled. This matches the "look" of a lot of low bitrate HD video, but I would argue that information has actually been lost in the upscaling process, not gained. It would be much easier to tell with before / after screenshots, I think, but at any rate I don't see a lot of reason to hope neural net upscaling will be useful for many "real world" purposes.

The HFR was pretty convincing to me, however.