> But more importantly because having integer scaling be sharp and snapped to pixels and fractional scaling a tradeoff is mostly a software limitation. GUI toolkits can still place all ther UI at pixel boundaries even if you give them a target scaling of 1.785. They do need extra logic to do that and most can't.

The reason Apple started with 2x scaling is because this turned out to not be true. Free-scaling UIs were tried for years before that and never once got to acceptable quality. Not if you want to have image assets or animations involved, or if you can't fix other people's coordinate rounding bugs.

Other platforms have much lower standards for good-looking UIs, as you can tell from eg their much worse text rendering and having all of it designed by random European programmers instead of designers.