As I read this I:
1. am wearing my computer reading glasses +1.5
2. have my browser set to zoom HN by 125%
3. am reading distance from the screen
I know programming and tech in general is a young man's game, but let's at least try not to be ignorantly ageist & ableist.
In reality, as of today, so far, neither desktops nor apps are that good where you can have the display set at it's correct native resolution, while having buttons, menus, icons, text, window controls etc all scale to preference.
But saying that that's what should happen rather than lie to the software about the hardware, is not agist or ableist.
I think the point was simply that fundamentally, lying to the software about the hardware is always inherently doomed to produce some form of incorrect result, and when it does, it's not the tech's fault for failing to second-guess, work-around, and essentially thwart your actively dishonest misconfiguration.
> But I find the fonts slightly too small at that resolution – given how far I sit from the screen.
You conflated that with sitting too far away. There are a lot of reasons why that might not be correct, including presbyopia. I think it's unlikely OP is sitting at that distance by accident, since it's pretty easy to move a monitor closer, so one of those reasons is more likely to apply than is your assumption.
For now I stand by my assumption that OP wanted the fonts to be bigger because they were too far from the screen to read them at their current size. Though I fear I can't see why their reason for wanting fonts to be bigger would matter. I could have omitted OP's reason for wanting the fonts to be bigger but I thought a brief description would help keep the discussion related to the article.
The main thing I was advocating was that software should allow fonts to be bigger regardless of physical size, but clearly I've somehow allowed my argument to be horribly misconstrued.
Sorry, as long as the site still works it’s simply not worth it.
The stupidest thing to do at that stage would be to say "ah I see you're running a low resolution on a huge screen, let me make all the text tiny".