Usually if the text is too small to read, the UI elements are too small to read as well.

I ran into this with VS Code. I have a giant monitor and wanted to increase the text side to avoid eye strain. I made the editor text bigger, but then struggled to see the text in the sidebar or other areas of the UI. Scaling for the app worked much better and it solved the problem everywhere in the app. It also still looks normal, increasing text size alone looked ridiculous, imo.

> struggled to see the text in the sidebar or other areas of the UI.

So your fist step didn't increase all text size, that's all, different from the OS setting that does

UI scaling would proportionally increase the size of a button. Text scaling would only increase the text in a button