It’s pretty wild. I have recently been ripping my DVD/Blu-ray collection and encoding them from a clean rip to my server. Encoding at 480p is perfectly acceptable if you’re starting with a high enough bitrate source. You can tell it’s 480p, but its so much better than Netflix’s absolute trash streams that will give you “UHD” at bitrates lower than a DVD. 360p does leave something to be desired, but they’re still perfectly watchable.

There are certainly shows and movies that deserve higher definition, but I’ve found that unless they’re from the ground up meant to be purely visually masterpieces, it’s better to have lower resolution and a matching bitrate than to ruin the experience with artifacts.