I’m not in disagreement with the points you bring up.
I’m saying, if the goal is to emulate the look of the cartoons from the 40s - 50s, then reliance on modern techniques and shortcuts tends to show through and leave it feeling as though it’s missing something.
The something I feel it’s missing is the ingenuity of the great animators of the past and the techniques they developed in order to accomplish their goals with the materials they had available. It might be a bit janky at times, but that’s what makes it authentic looking.
It’s in the wrinkles that the software and techniques used these days iron out, giving everything that smooth “sameness”.
Take the teaser video in this post. I believe it feels similar to the cartoons of the past, but it still misses the mark. It’s in the “uncanny valley” that exists when trying to mimic a look from the past. It’s close, closer than a lot of modern animation (that isn’t trying to look vintage) would be, but something isn’t right.
To my eye, the colors feel right, the title card has some nice bleeding in the lettering and looks like it was hand painted, but the black line work in the actual cartoon feels too smooth. No variation between frames that you see with cell animation.
But it does look like they are creating the tweens rather than letting a computer fill them in, based on a random screen grab:
