Nokia’s legendary font makes for a great user interface font

UI has some very particular requirements—typefaces have to be hinted really well so that they work on displays with lower pixel density. Also, such typefaces generally have very tall x-heights so characters can be distinguished well, which can be seen in all the early 2000s UI typefaces, from this Nokia one to Lucida Grande, to Tahoma. More modern ones tone this down a little, at the cost of some character. SF Pro, Segoe UI and as the user mentioned, Inter are considerably closer to Frutiger and Helvetica.

Speaking of which...

> finally displacing Inter after many years of uncontested service

Inter is by far the blandest typeface possible—it feels like the designer thought 'let's take all the sans-serifs and smush them together'. Its several contextual alternates just dilute it even more. I would never use it for UI, let alone any sort of branding.

No, Inter is fantastic, it is the only typeface that produces legible text on one of the monitors I have with DPI a bit lower than 82 (I know...)

I look at most fonts that get recommended here and it's immediately obvious they weren't tested on low end monitors at all (which is what most people I know use).

(As an aside, Cascadia is the only compact monospace font that looks good on this POS. Other good looking typefaces are too vertically stretched — oversized x-height.)

Why must a UI use the same font on low DPI displays as on high DPI displays?

I don't want the font to change just because I moved a window from my high DPI laptop display to my external low DPI display.

Most people place functionality over design, but there is no reason why you can't have it your way. Just make the fonts configurable. Your usecase isn't very common so I wouldn't make _that_ the default choice, though.