HN uses 12px. At 25% below the range, this is significantly undersized, and 120% scaling is about the minimum I can tolerate (though I don’t find myself going up to 133% for some reason, which I might have thought I would do, but I decided I didn’t like it).

The site in question uses 25.3px. At 26.5% above my proposed range (and 40% above my recommendation), this is significantly oversized.

If your eyes are straining at 70%, which reduces it to 17.71px, something’s wrong, probably in your setup—because that’s generally still at least 10% larger than all the rest of the text in your OS! (Linux/Sway: Firefox UI seems to be largely 14.667px with a little 15.4px, and this 14.667px seems visually to match other apps.)

No, creata is correct. This site’s text is very unreasonably and troublesomely large, and even shrinking it to 80% leaves it very mildly oversized.

(The lead paragraph is 32.2px, which does reach the point I would happily describe as comically large. The quote a couple later is 21.85px.)

No, the reason why it’s customary to boost the font-size a little on larger screens is because otherwise things start to look silly because you’re using such a tiny part of the space available to you, and you have a larger viewport, so you can increase the size a bit without losing too much from the screen at any time. But if you take it too far, it starts to look silly for different reasons, because it’s unreasonably large (and more importantly, inconsistent with common practice).

(Also: 16px = 12pt.)

I guess that partially explains it, I'm on a laptop which is naturally closer than a desktop monitor.

I guess in 2006 the resolution of monitors wasn't the same as it is today meaning (if the website wasn't updated since then) it was never tested on a 14 inch near 4k display.