What makes a font cheap-looking? I don't have an eye for this sort of thing but it looks fine to me.
Verdana, the font HN uses, was designed to be readable at small sizes on lo-res screens, so has very wide counters. It’s also why it looks ugly in high-res or when printed.
Good interface fonts tend to be more condensed, so you get more on a line - think Roboto or Inter. It’s also probably why Apple moved from Helvetica, a good print font, to San Francisco which was specifically designed for UI.
Verdana is actually undersized relative to most fonts. The ascender range is too large, so the baseline is off as well. And as you pointed out, the blue zones are similar to Noto anyway, so that aspect wouldn't affect readability.
I think you probably just have a low-res monitor. Noto has no bytecode hinting, so it would fall back to an auto hinter or remain unhinted and wouldn't present with the same sharpness.