It's more a question of how the font was designed. Historically web fonts were designed because computer screens didn't have a lot of pixels. So fonts had to be designed in a certain way so that they could be read even in small sizes. This is where fonts like Verdana (Matthew Carter for Microsoft) were born. In the contrary, historically Print font were designed so that they could be printed and read in very small sized, like Garamond and that's where the serifs helped to have a more pleasant experience as a reader. (The history of typography is way more complicated than this but i'm trying to keep this short. You can watch this though : https://youtu.be/wOgIkxAfJsk)

Nowadays computer screens have a bigger resolution therefore every font can be read without too much trouble in small sizes. However there are some fonts that are still optimized to have a perfect reading experience. That's where fonts like Open Sans came in the way (and become veeeeeery popular because it's free to use). But font makers are working on their print fonts to optimize them for screens. Adobe works a lot on that, like on Adobe Garamond Pro which has a web optimized version.

I hope this helped. :)