All game generations have their 'best of' games. Of the 1700+ NES games maybe 50 or so are actually classics and worth your time. Then you have the band of 'nostalgia and tough', only play if you are in for a challenges, or it is a game you grew up with. Then 'do not bother' which is the majority of the games.

The same is true for MSDOS games, Genesis, 2600, MSX, PS1/2/3/4, XBox, GB, GC etc etc etc. The majority of games out there are just not good or have aged poorly on the graphic/playability front. I personally would recommend only a very small handful of games on the NES. Also one issue with some of these older systems is they were meant to be played on a 15-20 inch PAL/NTSC screen with interlacing. You splat that across a 65 inch OLED they tend to look bad. Your brain is good at making up the detail.

The graphics were bad, but what really makes the games unapproachable now is a lot of the games were impossibly hard.

Anyone growing up in that era should have fond memories of arcade games that were far better than most NES games — there were still real arcades while the NES was current.

However, try playing the first level of Super Mario Bros on original NES hardware. The game mechanics basically still hold up.

All Atari 2600 games were worse than NES games, and primitive as anything. But try Breakout with paddles on an original 2600; again, the mechanics are good and it’s fun, at least briefly.

I don't know how to call this but the ratio of magic versus graphics resolution fascinates me. 8bit games were often very crude, but you got the essential for a gamer's mind to rejoin for hours.

This is super valid. I grew up with these games, and I have heavy nostalgia for them, but they were heavily limited by the hardware of the time. I think some series have had really good modern translations, like the New Super Mario Bros series which has a play-style very akin to the originals, but in a modern format and graphics. I would also consider Mario Maker an example of this as well. But these examples are generally rare and more often there has been a full shift to 3D gaming (Mario Galaxy/Odyssey etc) and side-scrolling is a thing of the past, because a lot of those traditional NES game styles are kind of limited and garbage compared to modern games. I still have my NES, and it still works, but I don't exactly find myself breaking it out all the time to play as opposed to playing a modern game in a modern format.