Out of curiosity I played with the scaling options on COSMIC 
.
It also allows me to grow the panels and icons separately from other UI elements, I suppose one could combine these tricks. If doing both the panels can get quite enormous. This is on a 1920x1080 display.
Relying on is perhaps too strong, but I enjoy operations like sort getting faster and I don’t know how they’ve written cp but there’s a cp alternative using async IO with io_uring that’s almost twice as fast, I’m sure it’d interest people if such optimizations made it into coreutils.