It is a bit of a PITA to set up, but can be done without too much pain and, once sorted, it's generally good. My daily driver is a HiDPI laptop running Arch & i3 and it works nicely!

I'm not saying it can't be done, it just needs to be better without all the chicanery.

Mine are on Arch & dwm, one with a 4k scaled down 150% (or 133% depending on my mood), for me it mostly works. But it would be much nicer to just not worry about it.