There are discrete phosphors that light up separately. They are not addressable discretely. They do not have the same count or density in every display. They provide an upper bound to how fast your display hardware can react to changes in the input signal. But they aren't pixels in the traditional sense. They're phosphors.
This is all a bit of a strawman though - transport yourself back in time before LCD monitors and most people were comfortable referring to the glowing squares on the screen as pixels. That you now define a pixel as a physically distinct separately-electronically-addressable unit doesn't change that.
It is no strawman. Because a lot (most? all? I don't recall, but that was my experience) of monitors in the CRT days had resolutions that went much higher than the true ability of the monitor to show detail, so it really matters to understand that those 'glowing squares' as you call them are totally unrelated to pixels. Setting higher resolutions on those monitors didn't relate to getting more detail out of your picture.
I've sometimes seen people on HN argue that CRTs could go as high or higher than early LCDs in resolution, but what those people never say is that those "high" resolutions looked very blurry compared to a LCD.
People only cranked up the resolution if they wanted more room to work with, not more details. Personally I was always more comfortable with the lower resolutions on such displays, plus, because of the way the tech worked, CRTs were limited in refresh rate at their peak resolution and in my opinion they were atrocious to look at if they were run at 60 hertz.
On the other hand, LCDs were very bad at showing any resolution other than native, which made them very bad for gaming as any time you needed to drop the resolution to run a game at a decent framerate you would be stuck with a blurry image. Plus, even today's high refresh rate LCDs are worse at motion than CRTs due to sample-and-hold.
All in all, it was difficult to tell whether you would like a CRT before buying it, as it wasn't well advertised how sharp the picture would look at X or Y resolution.
With LCDs at least that part is not a problem. If it says it can display 4k density of pixels, that is what you get. You will still need to judge them for their viewing angle, latency, or quality of color, but detail is no longer an issue.
For what it's worth, I think a lot of the blurriness people are referring to with early LCDs is motion ghosting. It was terrible for several years, and it made anything in motion a blurry mess. I definitely remember early LCDs as blurry for games because of that.
It doesn't matter what those people used to say. The word "pixel" has (and had) a specific meaning that's not analogous to what goes on on the surface of a CRT; at least, not on the horizontal axis. If some people mistook the metal mask in front of the phosphor for a grid that separates individual pixels, then they were simply wrong.
