I’d prefer that to not be so, because 5K panels are so much more expensive. But in a side by side comparison it’s very obvious.
But the market has spoken: a quality 4K display is very good, certainly good enough, and the value for money is great.
I’m ok with spending more on a better display that I spend so much time with. The cost per use-hour is still very, very low.
And MacOS has removed support for subpixel rendering because "retina", though I only use it when forced (work).
When considering a single-cable solution like Thunderbolt or USB-C with DP altmode, if you are not going with TB5, you will either use all bandwidth for video with only USB2.0 HID interfaces, or halve the video bandwidth to keep 2 signal lanes for USB 3.x.
(I am currently trying to figure out how can I run my X1 Carbon gen 13 with my 8k TV from Linux without an eGPU, so deep in the trenches of color spaces, EDID tables and such as I only got it to put out 6k to the TV :/)