Willing to be wrong of course, I suspect that what I'm seeing and what others are seeing are quite different.

Perhaps there's a component of how the LCD is presenting it involved? to me my font is extremely uniform and sharp with no bleeding or blurring.

What tweaks do you have? I used to run X11 and ran the gamut of x11 based font rendering tweaks (example of how my old machine looked: https://i.imgur.com/J9biJsW.png )

But with sway/wayland I have much less ability to change things.

This screenshot looks better than the other of yours, but honestly I think it's more due how how antialiasing is rendered there vs in your Firefox screenshot.

Additionally, for ages Linux had shipped with Full hinting, which means distorting the font so straight lines are always on integer pixel boundaries, which looks atrocious. These days distros like Fedora use Light hinting, which is a little better, and in my opinion No hinting looks best, which is what macOS does, but on a low DPI screen means having blurry font. So on low DPI screens you have the choice between distorted but clean fonts, or undistorted blurry fonts.

I don't know about sway, in my case I'm using Fedora with 2x scaling, so I have the option of disabling hinting and avoiding distortion.