The problem is, as soon as you are not on a Mac but Linux or Windows, you are in for an awful, truly awful lot of pain. HiDPI support is a mess because even in the rare case applications are made with HiDPI in mind they are not tested on HiDPI machines.
Other way around, most Mac software is not tested how it behaves on inferior external monitors.
What kind of windows programs are these? HiDPI is more than a decade old. A desktop application, no matter what OS it is, should always be tested with different scaling factors.
Oh my sweet summer child. Even software being written TODAY isn’t being tested in HiDPI. Win32 still makes it difficult.
I’m not your child, and that’s false, it’s literally one key to change in the settings. That allows you to select the exact scaling factor, not macos’s “more text”/“less text”.
Ham radio software, both open-source and commercial, is a big thing, and so is many an in-house development in many businesses.
I've been fine with Linux/KDE. Even the fractional scaling support is decent.
Edit: Guess it depends on the app