For example, if you grew up in an English-speaking country, your computer likely defaulted to Arial or Helvetica as its sans-serif font. Over time, your brain became familiar with how words looked in those typefaces—their proportions and shapes.
Because fonts like Inter and SF share similar proportions, your brain finds them easier to process, which makes them feel more readable.
I don't think anything is more readable to me. It hit the sweet spot of being condensed enough for easy reading but still with highly legible individual characters too.
I have always wished someone could have made a scalable version to bring it into the future of high resolution displays.
I even found a ~30 year old screenshot with some xterms in it, so I could verify that my memory isn't just distorted. The glyphs are different. But, the screenshot also feels a little foreign to me, so my memory may also be distorted ;-)
At this point, I keep coming back to Noto Sans Mono Medium as my fallback.
It's kind of pleasing shapes at 12 point for me, but too small on my screens... incrementally scaling up to 13,14,15 seems to degrade the quality.