Huh.

At work I have a mac mini and a Windows box, and I use three crapola Asus monitors between them, and my impression has been that macOS does a better job rendering text on said crapola monitors (the Windows box does a better job at compiling C++ in a timely fashion, though, so I mostly work on that one).

It's just a different stylistic choice. A lot of font nerds prefer the OSX choices because they try to stay true to the original font spacing without regard to the pixel grid.

Missing sub-pixel antialiasing is plain technical deficiency, not a stylistic choice. I agree arguments can be had about hinting and aligning the glyphs to the pixel grid, but not much beyond that.

It's still there, you just have to go turn it on.

But yes, I didn't know that they ripped out subpixel rendering in late 2018 by default.

Yeah they didn't completely remove it, but they did a good job of hiding it by not making it an option to turn on in the GUI. Have to use a terminal command to enable it: https://apple.stackexchange.com/a/337871

In general with a HiDPI screen I don't find any need for it. But on a low-res display like the typical 24" 1080P models it certainly helps.

Starting with Catalina, it does not fix the issue. I had to send back a Macbook Pro 16 2019 because of that and go back to Linux.

I've been looking for this for so long. Can't wait to try it out tomorrow