alt Hacker NewsYou are correct. I worked on this for years at Mozilla. See https://robert.ocallahan.org/2007/02/units-patch-landed_07.h... and https://robert.ocallahan.org/2014/11/relax-scaling-user-inte... for example. Some of the problems were pretty hard but the Web ended up in a pretty good place --- Web developers pretty much don't think about whether scaling factors are fractional or not, and things just work... well enough that some people don't even know the Web is "free-scaling UI"!
It mostly works but you can still run into issues when you e.g. want to have an element size match the border of another. Things like that that used to work don't anymore due to the tricks needed to make fractional scaling work well enough for other uses.