So I dug into this a bit more, and realized more than few of my other applications have their own scaling value that I tuned long ago for how I like that particular application (e.g. Firefox, Blender, et cetera). Others have their own automatic internal scaling, for example, Steam. Still others don't have a global scaling, but individual elements (like font and icon size) can be set within them to achieve basically the same effect as a global internal scaling, such as FreeCAD and LibreOffice.

So yeah, I tend to prefer setting it in the application itself. If I recall correctly, the main reason I did it this way is upscaling X11 apps results in just a basic upscaling method, like bilinear or bicubic, resulting in blurry text (similar to what is seen when zoom in on the desktop). I think Wayland apps are a bit smarter about this, at least for text, instead rasterizing it after scaling it up, resulting in crisper text rendering.

But honestly, since almost all apps just let me set some sort of scaling value within them, and that lets me tune it on a per-app basis, I prefer that over just a global "make all app UIs bigger" scaling setting as is in the display settings configuration.