He's using "i3 with a heavily customized userspace" which isn't exactly what most people would use. Gnome on X11 lets you (integer) scale monitors through a GUI at the very least.
X11 is not capable of doing this properly. Wayland is and as you probably know, nvidia refuses to support it which is out of the control of linux developers. You can get everything working if you use the open source nvidia drivers but then they run slow as shit because nvidia blocks them from setting the clock speed on the gpu.
Basically every problem falls back on nvidia and the linux desktop people have done everything in their power to make it work.
So... get an AMD GPU instead?