Unfortunately, "pixel-not-a-pixel" and "scaling" won out as approaches, when us greybeards remember being able to choose our font sizes, everything scaling in accordance (or well, at least all the Gtk+ 2 programs did) and X actually reporting the true DPI to software. For laptop and desktop use, I found it immeasurably better.

Sure, responsive layouts that work on tiny screens were missing.

Still, I find fractional scaling to suck even more on systems other than Linux, and some even make other terrible decisions to drop things like subpixel rendering (looking at you MacOS and all those non-existing 10K 32" retina screens).