How does a screen work?

CRTs are still slightly magical to me. The image doesn't really exist. It's an illusion. If your eyes operated at electronic speeds, you would see a single incredibly bright dot-point drawing the raster pattern over and over. This YouTube video by "The Slow Mo Guys" shows this in action: https://youtu.be/3BJU2drrtCM?t=190

That slo-mo video is somewhat misleading, though. The phosphor glows for a good while, so there is a reasonable chunk of the image that's visible at any given time.

The problem in that video is that the exact location the beam is hitting is momentarily very bright, so they calibrated the exposure to that and everything else looks really dark.

The phosphor still drops off very quickly [0][1][2], roughly within a millisecond. That’s why you would need a 1000 Hz LCD/OLED screen with really high brightness (and strobing logic) to approximate CRT motion clarity. On a traditional NTSC/PAL CRT, 1 ms is just under 16 lines, but the latest line is already much brighter than the rest. The slow-motion recording showing roughly one line at a time therefore seems accurate.

[0] https://blurbusters.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/01/crt-phosp...

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phosphor-persistence-of-...

[2] https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Stimulus-succession-on-C...

I'm not quite sure what you're saying here. My assertion is that a visible image persists on the screen longer than it appears in the slo-mo clip. You can just point a camera with an adjustable shutter speed at a CRT and see it for yourself. Here's an example (might need to copy the URL and open in a new tab, they don't like hotlinking):

https://i.sstatic.net/5K61i.png

The brightly-lit band is the part of the frame scanned by the beam while the shutter was open. The part above is the afterimage, which, while not as bright, is definitely there.