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Regarding the specific Mad Men example. A possible explanation that springs to mind is that while the original on-set recording may have been done in a higher resolution format, broadcast was still at 1080p and as a result the original VFX where the vomit hose technician would have been painted out were done at 1080p and the failure to re-do the paint out at a higher resolution was a product of negligence, laziness, or penny pinching on the part of the parent company.
As for the rest, I've always kind of hated the rhetoric surround the alleged "sense-making crisis" because if anything I feel like politics and culture of today are more legible to the average citizen than they have been at anytime in living memory. I don't think that the average citizen has suddenly become more savvy, so much as the pretenses have been dropped. The legacy media was never unbiased or impartial but there was a time when they cared enough about the appearance of impartiality to give someone like Billy Graham the chance to make his case. That is not the world we live in today, and a lot of the alleged "crisis" is not a crisis so much as a failure by affluent liberals to adapt to the new paradigm. They still haven't accepted the fact that they live in a low trust society.
My mind goes to The Sparrow. A novel that popped up in my "you might be interested in..." feed and that I recently finished reading. The plot is a classic golden-age of sci-fi style first contact story in the same vein as Rendezvous with Rama or The Mote in God's Eye. I enjoyed the read, and I don't want to give any spoilers but things do not end well. I do not know if this was the author's intent, but my personal takeaway from the story was that things would have played out a lot better for everyone involved, humans and aliens alike, if the people running the first contact mission had been a bit less Ivory Tower idealist and a bit more military or working class. That is to say a bit more cynical, and a bit more paranoid about things like disease and establishing a proper permitter around your camp.
If this is the case (and it sounds plausible), then presumably the VFX layers in which the crew are painted out are transparent 1080p video files. Sounds like it would be trivial to upscale them to 4k and drop them into the timeline on top of your upscaled 4k live-action footage.
Perhaps, but it still has to be someone's job to do that for it to get done. I think Charlie is probably correct that whoever was managing the remaster didn't know or simply forgot that this was a thing that was needed, nobody got the job, and nobody at that level took the time to QA the final product.
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I've read The Sparrow a few years back. If I recall correctly things go poorly because everyone beings acting like an idiot the moment they touch down. It's hard to believe that they would teach someone how to pilot a plane but not that you need to keep the grass trimmend on a runway you plan to use, for example. I didn't like it.
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