I am not sure that rec 601 is the color space for NTSC. It’s the standard for SD content, introduced in 1982. And yes, it’s practically identical to rec 709. NTSC is its own RGB color space, introduced in 1953 by the FCC.
Can you explain this diagram? This pretty clearly shows that NTSC is a wider gamut, no? Btw it’s mostly wider in greens as you can see:
https://www.eizo.com/library/basics/lcd_monitor_color_gamut/
Yes, but you cannot use a transform to display a wide color gamut on an sRGB display and not get a clipped and incorrect image, correct? It’s not the transform causing the clipping it’s the fact that the display can’t display all the colors you’re giving it.