[smichel17]

Update: I played around with font settings, and if I disable antialiasing then I think am able to see individual pixels around the curves of letters. I say "think" because I can definitely pick out the sharp edges, but I'm not sure if I can identify the specific pixel. It becomes especially apparent (no longer a single pixel, I think) if you change the display scaling to 2x or 3x.

I'm not a font expert, and I stopped myself from going down a rabbit hole, here. So I'm not really sure if this is a fault of the monitor, the renderer, the font itself, or some other piece I'm not aware of. Are there fonts which are designed for display on ~150 PPI screens, which don't need antialiasing so much? I know MacOS doesn't do subpixel rendering, but I assume it does some form of antialiasing? Or does it use a higher DPI font as I was speculating about?

Overall, the experiment has convinced me that there is some benefit to higher PPI. I maintain that my ideal monitor would be something like a 16:9, 40 inch¹, 8k monitor. I'd run things at 2x scaling to avoid fractional scaling headaches. The increased screen size would leave the size of everything after scaling slightly smaller than on a standard 24 inch, 1080p sceen. And the 200+ PPI would keep everything looking crisp at that size (I find the extra pixels from 4k makes text legible at slightly smaller sizes).

[1]: I'm not sure that's the exact right size, I need to re-do my calculations for how large I want stuff to be at 2x scaling.