A few days late but stumbled on this thread.......
Interestingly, my nephew was part of a team that tried to recreate these photos in 2018 with modern equipment. They were sponsored by the Cincinnati Public Library and Hasselblad. As part of the project, they were lent top end Hasselblad cameras (100 Meg) and lenses. While the new pictures were amazing they still lacked the resolution of the original photos. It was pretty eye opening exhibit.
Nothing in the article you linked confirms that the original Daguerrotypes were more highly resolved than the Hasselblad images. I'd love to see examples if you have access to them.
I really don't think lenses achieved real sharpness across the frame until perhaps the Rapid Rectilinear (from Dallmeyer) or the Aplanat (from Steinheil) that came out in the 1860's. The article didn't say what size was used in that Cleveland panorama, but it was certainly no smaller than whole plate (6-1/2 by 8-1/2") and probably it was mammoth plate (not that these "standardized" sizes existed that early). But even though they resolved finely, they lacked contrast, and they had to be stopped down to beyond the diffraction limit to get acceptable performance across the format. And these lenses were astigmatic off-axis, and suffered from spherical aberration, in addition to severe chromatic aberration (which didn't matter with orthochromatic film of narrow spectrum). It was the development of dense barium flint glasses that made the RR possible.
(The classic Tessar is a descendent of the Rapid Rectilinear. The plasmat double-gauss design emerged from the same principle, however--roughly symmetrical lenses groups in opposition.)
Using orthochromatic film, the best of those ancient designs could achieve modern resolution, but with low contrast. Modern color photography imposes a range of further requirements, to say the least. And the 55x40mm sensor in that 'blad will need lenses of three times the resolution to render the same scene detail of an image made using the whole-plate format.
A lot of contact prints and tin-types from the 19th century look amazingly sharp, but then the image is the same size as projected by the lens. For each doubling of the final print, the lens needs twice the resolution to render the same scene details. As late as 15 years ago, ad-work for large displays used 8x10" film, and many landscape photographers are still using that format. An ad photo on 8x10 would be presented in a magazine with no enlargement, and will be limited only by the screen used for process color.
On the topic of flare, the Rapid Rectilinear had four air surfaces and two cemented services in its 4-element, 2-group design. The Tessar also minimized air surfaces, but the Tessar could also perform well at apertures up to f/2.8, whereas the RR was "rapid" because it opened up to maybe f/6 or f/8. The original six-element Planar from the 1890's was impractical because of all the air surfaces. The Sonnar was a very thick hunk of glass originally, but performed well to very large apertures (the first branded Sonnar was a 5-cm f/1.5 lens for the small-format Contax camera in the 30's). It had to be longer than "normal" for SLR's, however, because it didn't leave room for a mirror box. The first longer Sonnar was the Olympia Sonnar, which, at 180mm, was designed for sports photography for use in the 1936 Olympics. That design was little changed for the 180mm f/2.8 Sonnar made by the Carl Zeiss Jena for the Pentacon Six roll-film camera right up to the German unification.
The first commercial planars were made possible by coatings (which were invented in the 20's but used more widely in the 30's), but WWII interrupted its commercial appearance until the early 50's. At that time, the Planar was a five-element lens--not that similar to the original planar design. The Jena factory made nearly the same lens and called it the Biometar (Schneider's version was the Xenotar). Zeiss double-coated some interior elements in the 50's, but it was really the Japanese that commercialized multi-coating in the 60's. They were the first to consider the coatings as like an impedance matching system to eliminate reflections at the glass boundary. That opened the door to complex computer-aided designs. That has made possible lenses with reference sharpness wide open, even if they have variable focal lengths.
But photography is an older enterprise than audio, and analog optics and film developed to a higher state before the advent of digital. Consider how much progress magnetic tape made in the period from the 60's to the 80's, and much of it was driven by the need to make the cassette format less crappy. Had the compact disk not appeared for another, magnetic tape formulations might have improved by another 10 dB. (In photography, the advancements aimed at making 35mm less crappy--such as very thin emulsions and T-grain formulations--found their way into much larger formats, too.) The use of FM multiplexing for audio with rotating-head video was a sea change largely unnoticed by the history books. I was making field recordings with a Teac open-reel deck until I discovered just how good a HiFi VCR was even at the consumer level. I could actually afford a Mitsubishi HiFi VCR at a time when digital recording technology was vastly expensive. That's the first time I heard a recording that sounded exactly like the microphone feed to my ears, and it's the first time affordable and portable audio magnetic tape recorders achieved better than 80 dB S/N--nearly (at least) audibly transparent for most folks and 10-15 dB better than open-reel tape. Had that scheme been developed in the 60's (and there's nothing about it that couldn't have been done in the 60's), it would have certainly become commonplace before the compact disk. Audio just has less of a head start than did photography.
Rick "a confluence of topics that dangerously opens the verbal floodgates" Denney