The NTSC to which we bid final farewell was a spectacularly successful thing. Think of it. The reverse engineering of compatible color to an existing black & white standard, which itself had been a compromise between the maximum resolution which contemporary technology was capable of in 1941 and the maximum change existing receivers of the time could adapt to.
In that sense it was an evolved standard whose roots go back 70 years.
Yesterday a TRK-12 could receive television signals off the air just as it did in 1939. It was not obsolete.
That was yesterday.