@sjmulder I think that most "Retina" displays on laptops had 2x scaling, so I'm not sure whether that contributed much. Personally, I've got my set of scapegoats:

@sjmulder You're talking about pure text window font sizes here, right? Because the UI elements of IDEs (if they still have 'em) do tend to get flatter and whitespacier (IntelliJ users especially complaining about some changes here, IIRC).

I mean, there's a lot of changes besides DPI going on here, too, as it seems to also affect proper point sizes. Laziness changing sizes when switching between laptops and desktops or laptop-oriented defaults, surely play a role. But also rabid Clean Code fanboys cutting functions/methods down to single digit numbers & IDE/LSP support where you just click through your code more lessens the need for a literally bigger context window. Tabs/tmux replacing multiple terminals/editors. Anti-aliased font rendering and low-contrast themes. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if cargo-culting coding streamers is becoming part of this scenarios, too.

It's a wild ride anyways, if you include actual terminals. Where we started quite small due to small monitors, then those got bigger but the resolution stayed with 80x24, then we reached a total font size (px and pt) minimum with pixelated fonts on crisp displays, and now everything is getting bigger again.