> If you're using a high-DPI monitor [...] I use a standard 110-DPI monitor (at 200% scaling in Gnome)

FWIW, I'm using a 184 DPI monitor with 150% scaling.

> you might not notice the blurriness. [...]

> Compared to the contents of a browser's viewport, Emacs and the apps that come with Gnome are visually simple, so it took me a year or 2 to notice

I'm pretty sensitive to font rendering issues—to the point where I've complained to publishers about their PDFs having unhinted fonts—so I think that I would have noticed it, but if it's really as subtle as you say, then maybe I haven't.

I do have a somewhat unusual setup though: I'm currently using

  $ gsettings set org.gnome.mutter experimental-features "['scale-monitor-framebuffer','xwayland-native-scaling']"

although that might not be required any more with recent versions. I've also enabled full hinting and subpixel antialiasing with Gnome Tweaks, and I've set the following environment variables:

  MOZ_ENABLE_WAYLAND=1
  QT_QPA_PLATFORM=wayland
  GDK_BACKEND=wayland,x11,*
  CLUTTER_BACKEND=gdk,wayland
  SDL_VIDEODRIVER=wayland
  SDL_VIDEO_DRIVER=wayland
  ECORE_EVAS_ENGINE=wayland_egl
  ELM_ENGINE=wayland_egl
  QT_AUTO_SCREEN_SCALE_FACTOR=1
  QT_ENABLE_HIGHDPI_SCALING=1

So maybe one of those settings would improve things for you? I've randomly accumulated most of these settings over the years, so I unfortunately can't really explain what (if anything) any of them do.

> Yes, Chrome's entire window can be quite blurry if Xwayland is involved, but it now talks to Wayland by default

Ah, good to hear that that's finally the default; that probably means that I can safely remove my custom wrapper scripts that forced those flags on.