It's less of a question of if you could get a CRT that could do it versus having a PC with the video RAM and drawing performance to do it effectively at high color bit depth. Tons of extremely common desktops at the time shipped with only 2-4MB video memory with their integrated graphics chipsets. You're not doing 1280x1024 at 32-bit color with 2MB of RAM.

Yeah sure you can take a machine with only 4MB of video memory and try to draw a 1600x1200 CRT, but you're not going to be able to have that many colors.

It often wasn't a limitation of your monitor, it was a limitation of your video adapter. Rattling off some common specs of monitors isn't telling the full story of what most random people were actually experiencing.

I still remember having to upgrade our main home desktop at the time of Warcraft I I'd release because it didn't have enough video memory to meet the 8MB minimum needed. That was in 2002 on a machine purchased with XP, a Pentium 4 HT with 512MB of system memory. Not necessarily a low end machine, but obviously not a gaming PC at the time and much newer than many systems sold for Windows 98.