I agree it's quite tricky to assess and provide accurate feedback but for very different reasons, which I cover below. I disagree about "people who were around at the time" for the simple reason I worked in both video production and creating production software/hardware tools from the mid-80s to the late 2000s and still have VHS, S-VHS, 8mm/Hi8, Laserdisc and 3/4" VTR players hooked up in racks here at home and a half a dozen low-hours CRTs ranging from Sony consumer to BVM and industrial analog RGB arcade monitors (yeah, I'm kind of a retro computer, video and gaming nerd). More importantly I still have a good analog test signal generator, waveform monitor and vectorscope.
Why it's hard: It's easy to run synthetic test signals like a zone plate and 8 MHz sweep through a video system and see what's happening quantitatively. The challenge is the target isn't well defined. People's qualitative expectations for "looks like VHS" vary widely, not because of fading memory but because they're using "VHS" to mean more than just the half-inch magnetic tape recording format. Engineering-wise the VHS tape format is largely defined by a fixed bandwidth in megahertz and lines of vertical resolution. But those are theoretical maximums virtually no consumer gear ever achieved. The same tape could look quite a bit different on a really good VHS VCR than the typical Goldstar VCR from Sears. And the tape quality mattered as well as if it was professionally duped or home recorded on a Goldstar and which VHS recording mode was used. It wasn't uncommon that my home recorded VHS tape wouldn't play on my friend's VCR. Tracking was impacted by everything from component quality, calibration, belt wear and temperature. The same professionally mastered VHS tape on my 8-head professional S-VHS deck viewed on a Sony BVM broadcast monitor will look a lot different than it did on your parent's Magnavox VCR and Sylvania TV.
When they say "looks like VHS", most people are including composite video encoding and analog cable cross-talk and how their CRT decoded the signal. And in the analog era, all those things could matter a lot in terms of what you saw on screen. I happen to have a box of individually sealed, unopened VHS tapes here that were duped on a professional duplicator directly from my D2 sub-master in 1991 - and I happened to dump some test signals at the end of the master after the client's program. D2 is a digital composite video format sampled at 14.32 Mhz. My pro-VHS VTR can pull a hair over 5 Mhz from one of those tapes. Your Mom's Goldstar VCR probably never pulled more than around 3 Mhz from any tape it ever played and even from one of my tapes, it wouldn't touch 4 Mhz. So, are we targeting what was theoretically possible in the tape standard, what my tape and VCR actually output right now, or what someone remembers from whatever VCR, cables, tape and CRT combo they had in a given year?