Another thing worth mentioning is how the plots were made. Here, the author seems to have just taken screenshots from MS Excel, and not actually exported anyth

Another thing worth mentioning is how the plots were made. Here, the author seems to have just taken screenshots from MS Excel, and not actually exported anything to a portable format. Even the jagged, choppy Excel graphs look fairly smooth when exported as a .PDF file (as Excel does save the vector data for smooth curves) or another comparable vector format. Specifically, in the author's first example (the exponentially decaying sinusoid), viewing that graph in MS Excel will always appear jagged and pixellated. However, if you were to export the chart as a .PDF, the aliasing artifacts would completely disappear (or at least be comparable with the Python-rendered example). I use this technique when I make some quick charts/graphs in Excel and want to include them in a LaTeX document. You can move a chart/graph to it's own full-page "worksheet", and then Save As a PDF file. Since the PDF output is in vector format, it works nicely with LaTeX documents (as you can use \includegraphics{} natively with .PDF documents), and scales well to any size without artifacts. That being said, there is one thing I do agree with here: the way MS Excel renders graphs/charts when editing them is pretty horrible. You can, however, get around the issue by choosing an appropriate output format (you might just have to zoom in a lot when editing to avoid the aliasing temporarily).