One thing that used to be possible with Freetype was configuring how "heavy" hinting was: I remember the time when autohinted fonts looked the best with "light"

One thing that used to be possible with Freetype was configuring how "heavy" hinting was: I remember the time when autohinted fonts looked the best with "light" hinting. They were smooth, non-bold and I couldn't see colour fringing either. You could also set the RGBA vs whatever pixel layout in the same Gnome settings dialog. Easy-peasy adjustment for a VA panel. After, it was available only in gconf/dconf or a tool like gnome-tweaks or similar. MacOS is definitely terrible today, but I prefer Linux over Windows still.