You missed the explanation above why you're wrong, at least on consumer non-PostScript printers. Most cheap printers nowadays passes the buck of rasterisation to Windows (and its horrible, security headache spooler). You can even check if which is which: in Windows 10, open Settings, then Devices, select Printers & scanners, select [your name of printer], press Manage, press Printer Options (not Printing options), open the Advanced tab and then click on the Print Processor... button. If it says "winprint" then Windows handles the rasteriser.
I think they meant something like "ink smears".
Pinpointing a version of Windows, if it was printed from a stock OS font, could be as simple as comparing tiny differences in the vector files and knowing if one pixel would rasterize at 60% black versus 50%. To the extent that the rip goes through a graphics card, it would be knowing whether that card rendered the 60% as 58% or 62%.
I'm pretty sure if you scale it down, the printer driver will do an extra layer of downsampling and add its own anti-aliasing; but the printer hardware doesn't do that, it just sprays the dots it's told to spray, and in general the drivers replicate the pixels that are sent from Photoshop or in this case, MS Word, which uses something like QuickDraw used to be on a Mac, an embedded system process, to rasterize the fonts.
Also, I doubt you can get conclusive evidence from a single letter. Luckily, your average random note has lot of them, even duplicated ones. I would carefully align and average out as many capital A’s as I had, and work with that.