Personally i sit close to the monitor because i cannot see that far. I could scale things up, but then i lose screen real estate (and a lot of stuff break with non-default scaling, including some of my own programs). I could lower the resolution, but anything non-native looks blurry as hell. For a while i used a 42" TV and while it was nice, it was blurry.
So i get the best results by sitting closer to the monitor. I want to be able to see the pixels and have screen real estate, so i use a 27" 1920x1080 monitor (LG... something, i don't remember the model, although TBH i'd prefer to use a smaller monitor with a smaller resolution, but any panel with a lower resolution than 1920x1080 has awful image quality and personally i see even IPS panels as a step backwards compared to my Sony CRT and cannot wait for OLED panels... hopefully in sane sizes and DPI). I also have a 2560x1440 monitor (Dell U2713HM) which i bought after seeing several artists at a previous job use it and liking the image quality, but i have stopped using it both because things are a bit too tiny for my taste and because in high end games my GPU (GTX 980) starts to struggle a bit unless i lower the settings considerably. Although TBH often i prefer to play games in a window so i can have some stuff still visible around (especially in Window Maker, my WM of choice, which is generally distraction free) and with 2560x1440 i can use 1920x1080 for the window resolution which often matches the UI scale the game uses but with 1920x1080 as the native resolution i need to use something smaller like 1600x900 which often crushes the UI, making it blurry. But that is a small price to play.
But FWIW, i don't mind antialiased fonts even though bitmaps do indeed look much crisper to me too.