Especially for the command line and a browser which are primarily rendering text, pixel density matters so much! Why look at pixelated text when you can have print-quality crisp text? I never want to go back to low pixel density displays!
I had an XPS 15 with 4k display in 2016, yet in 2025 it’s somehow difficult to find a laptop with that pixel density?
I wonder the same with phones actually, my Nexus 6P from 2015 (10 years ago!) had an amazing 518 ppi display. When the modem died I got a Pixel 2 which had only 441 ppi, and the display was a really noticeable downgrade, text looked significantly uglier, I could see the pixels and hinting artifacts again. I expected high pixel densities to become mainstream to the point where every screen has a density at the limit of what the human eye can perceive, yet here we are 10 years later, and Google’s flagship phones have only 495/486 ppi, worse than the Nexus 6P!
Pixel density is important for crisp small text, so cli on a 14 inch screen and maybe web browsing would be good reasons for a 4k display - it would be the only reasons for me at least.
For the same reason your PC screen likely has more than 480p resolution even though you technically don’t need more than that, why you have stereo instead of mono sound, and more than one CPU core.
My hunch is that relaxing this seemingly arbitrary requirement will result in many suitable notebooks