There are 2 issues on Apple:

1) How much font hinting to apply. More hinting changes the shape to make glyphs line up better with pixels so that less antialiasing is required. macOS prefers very light hinting to preserve shapes at the cost of blurriness. This is what you are talking about.

2) Subpixel rendering. This effectively triples the horizontal resolution when rendering fonts, and does not affect the shape at all. Fonts look dramatically better on normal dpi displays when using it. macOS removed support for this many years ago. This is what I'm talking about.