[noggin]

w3fdif half works okayish and looks quite well ... yeah, so much for that. Really great it's not - but what to expect with HDR 4k 60p on the other hand :-)  - The time when deinterlacing was mandatory is gone. For all those with interlaced rips, use the GPU to convert it away. Less space, better for archiving.

I guess you live in a country with no interlaced Live TV...   

Interlaced TV is dieing. Everything here either goes the 4K route or is transitioned to webservices like zattoo, waibu.tv, dazn, sky go etc. - in the new house I did not even care to install a new sattelite dish.
And if you really need it for the next 12 months, transcode it on the fly with vaapi hevc encoder.  

Ah - here in the UK interlaced TV is still the dominant format used by the most watched platforms (DVB-T/T2 is still the most widespread platform for TV viewing here) Broadcaster OTT services, apart from the BBC's, are locked down to their own apps, and SD quality, but at 25p not 50p, so nowhere near the quality of the DVB sources. (All4, ITVHub are both 1024x576p25 for example, not p50)

BBC iPlayer has occasional 2160p25/50 HDR stuff (FA Cup Final, Wimbledon, Attenborough wildlife docs) but the bulk of it is still 720p50 HD and has a lot more compression artefacts compared to the quality of their 1080i25 broadcast streams (which if you are watching on a large UHD screen is an issue).

If you want to watch the 5 main channels here in quality, in Kodi, you need to have an interlaced solution. We transitioned to DVB-T2/S2 with h.264 using 1080i25 in the 00s (actually i25/p25 dynamically switched GOP by GOP on-the-fly by the statmuxed h.264 encoders on DVB-T2, S2 is permanent 1080i25). If we'd waited longer we could have gone 1080p50 with h.265 I guess (like Germany and Netherlands have for T2) - but that's by-the-by.

Interlaced distributed content (and in some case interlace native content) isn't going anywhere here for a good few years in the UK... Long term OTT stuff is hopefully going to transition from 576p25, 720p25 and 720p50 to 1080p50 and 2160p50 - but the DRM introduced is likely to be problematic for local recording (so you can't archive content on their OTT services to watch outside their catch-up windows) or for playback on Kodi platforms without the required DRM support.

I don't argue that interlaced standards are EOL for new platforms, but the old platforms aren't going away that quickly.

In production terms it's interesting that most 720p50 broadcasters like SVT, NRK, DR etc. run 1080i25/1080p25 internally and deinterlace for transmission, as I believe is the case for most ARD and ZDF stuff in Germany for both 720p50 and 1080p50 platforms - at least chatting to ZDF engineers I was left with that impression recently. (Even though almost all gear can switch between 1080i and 720p in the production chain - 1080i25 and 1080p25 are still preferred)