It's the only way macOS can scale without making a blurry mess

5k (2880p) -> (1440p) = good on a 27" 4k (2160p) -> (1080p) = okay on a 27" everything else: trash

why? macOS re-renders with antialiasing the whole display output, it doesn't scale windows.

It's a relic of the past (20 years ago), and a perfect example of technical debt. It was really good back then, with resolutions like 1920x1200 or 2560x1600, you couldn't spot a difference. But now it's really unbearable, Apple had to make 5K displays or odd resolutions for macbooks to circumvent this, and even with this you can only get crisp text by going with half resolutions.

Ironically, if you use X11 apps on macOS (thanks NeXTStep legacy), you can have better scaling lol