I've been using XFCE for several years on 4k screens and I agree that it's not great out of the box.
Once you've set it up it works pretty well though.
Now if only I could remember what I did to get it working nicely...(luckily I've had the same installation of XFCE on my machine for the past 5 years so haven't had to fiddle with that in a while)
I just set dpi to 128 or 192. The out-the-box 96 could do with changing.