it is very much a nostalgic feeling for me more than an aesthetic. i see a lot of "Totally 80's" stuff in pop culture that looks like it is trying too hard and misses a lot of things and just does neon over and over. i saw an intro today that just looked like someone cut up aerobics footage in Final Cut Pro, and everyone was praising it, but to me, it looked like cheap trash.
Stranger Things feels like it came out after 10-15 years of 80's nostalgia, and it was the first thing to more actually capture that nostalgic feeling for me. mostly i think of dark, wood paneled living rooms with thick shag carpeting, toys and action figures, outer space, Christmas lights, that blurry video look, early computer graphics, chiptunes etc. for me it's homey and cosey and warm and nostalgic. it is captured well in a lot of fast food commercials from the era. but there was something about that style of production, those big cheesy fake looking but fantastical sets, the futuristic emphasis on space and robots. the 80s felt like a mainstreaming of a lot of fantasy culture tbh, from sci fi to swords and sandals.
there is a lot visually that is missing from moder "80's style" stuff. i think we forget with our nice flat screen 4K monitors just how cool and magical CRT technology really was. at the arcade, sometimes you would be looking at it through a second screen, giving the glowing phosphors an almost holographic quality to them. modern screens are more accurate but that also means some element of oddness is now lost in translation. IMO the old CRT screens were a more magical medium. having the sound come out of the same tube also brought something to the experience that can't be replicated easily with modern gear.
you can see modern post production techniques like Bloom and Chromatic Aberration being introduced to emulate that analog method of display. CA is a retro effect because the separate RGB elements on a CRT tv can be misaligned, if only to a tiny degree, producing ghosting effects and color phasing. digital video processing is finally catching up to being able to mimic that look of old video, but there will always be something magical about the way it looks on OG hardware.