If you use the middle screen scaling you're given absolutely huge UI elements and it's the case for the inbuild 16" screen as well as external displays but when you get up to 32" displays it's almost comical how large the UI is on the middle / default setting.

Yeah, on larger monitors it's more common to run at the monitor's native resolution without scaling but even so macOS will not turn on HiDPI mode - you'd still need to do this explicitly via another app (I didn't even know it was possible to turn on HiDPI mode at native scaling until reading this article)