You know why vhs quality degraded with every generation of copy? It wasn't an accident or a technical problem, it was deliberate.
They want to discourge people from copying their tapes, so there was a mechanism in the VCR to actually cause some drop in quality when you taped something.
This is why TV tapings of a movie would never be as good as buying/renting the same movie from a store. Even if you used a virgin tape.
People used to enjoy anime and MST3k episodes on fifth generation VHS copies.
As a general rule, I prefer getting torrent links from friends in a Discord stream over huffing it over to a Blockbuster and hoping their single copy of "My Neighbor Totoro" isn't checked out. You can make the case for a better brighter tech future.
Just don't put half your paycheck into "TotoroCoin" because its trending on pump.fun