Correct. Unless you are positioning the monitor further from you than normal. There is at least one person on this site who uses a TV at a distance instead of a typical monitor setup.

I can imagine people being a bit irritated about this.

I have a small portable 13 inch 2k monitor that due to its size needs to rub in HiDPI mode but my M1 MacBook Pro is having none of it. Incredibly frustrating because there is absolutely no good reason for this!

I don’t mind if it requires “advanced” settings modes or terminal commands or whatever, but I should be able to configure a device I own to output any combination of resolution and display scaling that it’s capable of (and is supported by the connected display), regardless of what’s plugged in or whether someone at Apple can see a good reason to want to do so.

You might have a 1440p monitor that you sit far enough away from that you want things scaled to sizes that would be used on 1080p. The best way to do this on OSX is to use SwitchResX (product in the blog/website) to run things at hi-DPI 1080p (4K) and then scale back down to 1440p. Just scaling up from non hi-DPI 1080 looks bad.

A real world example: on my 24” monitor, 1080p 1920x1080 native has noticeable jaggies on kanji, it looks smoother rendering at 2560x1440 and displaying that as 720p HiDPI