Most of the things you call "way cheaper" have massive costs that aren't reflected in the price tag. The TVs, phones, and IoT appliances are spying on you 24/7 and pushing ads in your face. In terms of quality, much of that is highly debatable.

If you compare a call over the newest iphone to a call over a rotary phone from 60 years ago guess which one gave users better call quality? I don't remember who made the joke about advertisers going from "You can hear a pin drop!" to "Can you hear me now?" but that sums up the problem very well. TVs are bigger but still can't do everything CRTs could (color accuracy, contrast, variable resolutions). We have faster hard drives with SSDs but with limited numbers of writes and they lose data when not powered. Everything is just trade offs. Some things have been improved, some things have gotten worse, but however good things are right now you can bet they will be made worse going forward. Enshittification is real and increasing all the time.

For calculating price changes over time, there will always be the question: "is this the same product as earlier?"

Without a reasonableness factor, prices can't be compared for anything. An egg from a chicken in 1940 is different from one in 2026. If we want to be pedantic, every egg is different.

But I think it's pretty uncontroversial that the prices of TVs, cell phones, and most appliances, with similar features, have fallen considerably over the last few decades.