I have several issues with this analysis.
> Scaling support is spotty at best, and many applications simply do not support it properly.
Although I admit I only use a modicum of applications on windows scaling seems to work great on anything using an even halfway modern toolkit. On Linux it works quite well for example. If you are still running some oddball app from the 90s may I submit that you ought to throw it away rather than buying your hardware based on it unless it is truly essential.
> A 4k monitor technically has 4x the screen real estate of a 1080p monitor. That means if you drew a big ass rectangle and split it into a 2x2 grid, you could fit 1x 1080p monitor in each box of the grid.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding. Real estate is inches not pixels. More pixels means a clearer, more realistic, and more pleasant to look at work area in the same space not more area which can only be obtained by buying more physical space. There is absolutely no reason anyone ought to use a higher resolution to squint at increasingly smaller text that they can increasingly just make out because of the higher pixel density. Indeed nobody on earth uses monitors that way. At the point of logical absurdity. There was an 8k 20" screen at CES a while back. Imagine flipping it from 1080p resolution to 8k.
Nobody on earth would display a document first in full screen and then at higher resolution in a 5" diagonal. You would view the same document in the same space.
> Then there’s the whole problem of managing windows. Having 1 monstrous monitor is going to make it difficult to manage individual windows. You’re going to be spending a lot of time micro managing floating windows at various sizes.
People add windows based on physical real estate. Inches not pixels. Adding pixels doesn't add any complexity in window management whatsoever.
> If you took a 4k monitor and scaled it up to 200%, you would end up with exactly the same screen space as a 1080p monitor. Things will look quite a bit smoother, sort of like a Retina display, but you’re not really gaining anything.
You are literally gaining it looking smoother. It's the whole thing.
> Physical size doesn’t constitute how much you can fit on a monitor. For example my mom thinks that a 25” 1080p monitor is going to let her fit more things on her screen than a 22” 1080p monitor. Don’t be my mom!
Your mom is correct. Lets say your mom is hip and is running xterms with vim and because she knows what she likes she has an an exact character size in mm. Because physical size is what makes something pleasantly readable which is why your phone with its very high resolution doesn't have incredibly tiny pixels. Your mom can decrease her font size on her 25" monitor and have the exact same resulting physical size as your 22" and display more characters on her screen than yours. This is course at the expense of losing clarity which is why you also want a higher resolution.
> I mentioned earlier that my Chromebook is 1080p at 13.3” and I can comfortably code on it with Sublime Text at a typical laptop viewing distance which is about 12 inches away. Viewing it from 24” is far too much eye strain for me.
> Using this logic, I can deduce that a 27” 4k monitor at 163 PPI would likely strain my eyes a bit because the Chromebook’s PPI is 165 PPI. Yeah sure, I can technically read the text, but it takes way too much effort.
It doesn't take more work for your eyes to process higher resolutions. For one the your eyeballs have better resolution than your screen for another books are generally 300ppi or better. It becomes increasingly straining because the font size that is appropriate for reading up close is increasingly small. You can simulate the same experience by trying to read a book from increasingly far away.
My primary monitor is literally a 27" with 163 DPI with a 1080p screen beside it. It's scaled so that text is the same size on both displays. One isn't harder to read than the other.