Odd, my main setup is an external 4k monitor and I only use it with the “large text” text scaling and I have no complaints, the text is clear and large and easy to read. Perhaps you’re also using your laptop screen as well?

I have this problem as well. I actually run my 27-inch 4K screens downscaled on MacOS because the tiny font at native-4K gives me a headache.

The worst thing about it is that scaling seems to use more CPU than running natively and the OS has some noticeably additional latency when running scaled.