I'm pretty sure that's how most, if not all, instant messaging services worked 20 years ago... Was a feature, not a bug. The whole idea of sending an instant message. If you wanted to send a non-instant message, you'd send an email instead.
My focus was not so much on pixel perfect, but instead on creating something that would also work and look aesthetically pleasing on modern systems, like with higher DPI monitors and such. So one of the the things I did was to recreate all the icons and symbols in SVG.
I tried posting it as a Show HN when I added XP and Mac OS 9, but it didn't get much attention. Maybe the title of the project isn't as catchy.
Ran into this exact issue on a project. The developer that implemented the solution wanted to make sure that we handled those 6 digit PINs in the most secure way with salt and pepper and bcrypt, and at the end of the day the system only actually checked the first two digits of the PIN because bcrypt ignored the rest.
No, at least that's what I'm going for as well, at least for monospace fonts in editors and such. I can't stand the slightly blurry look of antialiased fonts and absolutely prefer the crisp edges of traditional bitmap fonts.