For me, if you spend your life reading and writing prose or code, text rendering quality is surely paramount. I’m curious what you think the energy should be spent on instead.
Text legibility is paramount, not rendering quality. Monochrome bitmap fonts are extremely legible once you're used to them, and they don't need 4K displays. Vector fonts with high-quality hinting and antialiasing disabled are almost as good.
It costs almost nothing to your GPU to render fonts in high quality with subpixel antialiasing. Especially when you can cache the rendered glyphs in a texture for reuse.
Compiling? Staying cool and not turning on the fan? Avoiding unnecessary waste?
Really anything rather than a thing that has only drawbacks.
As far as readability goes... can't see a difference with monospace text, maybe even worse as fonts tend to be thinner and need adjustments. Maybe a little better with proportional text on websites and documents.
