Since you bring it up, my second sysadmin gig was head of systems for a printing company, late 80s - early 90s, where I brought them into the digital typesetting era. So I also know more than a thing or two about fonts.

But I suspect you bringing it up, and me responding to it, doesn’t make either position more authoritative. And given “I’ve written more books than I can count” it could be your discernment of numbers or bar for objectively counting things is lower. ;-)

About retina vs. non retina, I’d argue font rendering algos matter more the less resolution they’re working with, so are even more important on non-retina displays. I’d further argue MacOS regressed on this by killing off sub-pixel rendering in Mojave, effectively dropping support for non-retina.

On low quality displays, Windows and Linux could/should look better than MacOS. When they don’t, they’re “doing it wrong”.