That sorting is pretty odd, and not really the thing for someone who doesn't know about the demoscene. For instance LFT's safe VSP demo was really high up. I understand why, it was a really important technical proof of concept and it explained something that had bothered demo coders for decades, but it's not a terribly interesting demo to watch. What impresses demo coders isn't necessarily the same that impresses the rest of us.
Some of my favorite classic demos are "Sound Vision" by Reflect, "Desert Dream" by Kefrens and "Enigma" by Phenomena. All demos that were popular enough in the 1990s that they reached me and my brother's Amiga by way of modems and swapping. They're all very enjoyable without knowing much about the coding challenges.
I'd say my favorite modern Amiga demo is "Eon" by The Black Lotus. For C64 the good modern demos are too many to count (and by comparison, the 80s era demos aren't terribly interesting), but I think maybe "Lunatico" by LFT is my favorite. Again it's one that doesn't require coding knowledge to appreciate.
This was always special to me, especially as a metalhead- they managed to capture the emotion of this song / part of the song so well, tech and style, fantastically combined.
Always love how they timed the surprising animation of the mask at the end (maybe face, don’t remember right now) too a smile in time with the emotional lift at the end of the song…
Gotta watch it later in full blast! :D thanks for reminding me!
One thing to keep in mind is that it's not just about the visuals, but about how they got those visuals to work with ridiculous limitations. As an example, "debris", the current top-ranked entry, has a total file size of 180kb and was released in 2007!
Most of them have links to yt videos.